Franco Berardi

We live in an age of impotence. Stuck between global war and global finance, between identity and capital, we seem to be incapable of producing the radical change that is so desperately needed. Is there still a way to disentangle ourselves from a global order that shapes our politics as well as our imagination? In his most systematic book to date, renowned Italian theorist Franco Berardi tackles this question through a solid yet visionary analysis of the three fundamental concepts of Possibility, Potency, and Power. Characterizing Possibility as the content, Potency as the energy, and Power as the form, Berardi suggests that the road to emancipation unravels from the awareness that the field of the possible is only limited, and not created, by the power structures that implement it. Other futures and other worlds are always already inscribed within the present, despite power's attempt at keeping them invisible. Overcoming any temptation of giving in to despair or nostalgia, Berardi proposes the notion of 'futurability' as a way to remind us that even within the darkness of our current crisis lies dormant the horizon of possibility.

The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility

Futurability

Hito Steyerl

In Hito Steyerl's writing we begin to see how, even if the hopes and desires for coherent collective political projects have been displaced onto images and screens, it is precisely here that we must look frankly at the technology that seals them in. The Wretched of the Screen collects a number of Steyerl's landmark essays from recent years in which she has steadily developed her very own politics of the image. Twisting the politics of representation around the representation of politics, these essays uncover a rich trove of information in the formal shifts and aberrant distortions of accelerated capitalism, of the art system as a vast mine of labor extraction and passionate commitment, of occupation and internship, of structural and literal violence, enchantment and fun, of hysterical, uncontrollable flight through the wreckage of postcolonial and modernist discourses and their unanticipated openings. e-flux journal Series edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle

The Wretched of the Screen

In this book, Franco Berardi presents an examination of new forms of alienation in our never-off, plugged-in culture - and a clarion call for a 'conspiracy of estranged people'.

From Alienation to Autonomy

The Soul at Work

Beginning with the futurism of F.T. Marinetti and the worldwide race towards a new and highly mechanised society that defined the 'century of progress', highly respected media activist Franco Berardi traces the genesis of future-oriented thought through the punk movement of the early 1970s and into the media revolution of the 1990s. Cyberculture, the last truly utopian vision of the future, ended in a clash, leaving behind an ever-growing system of virtual life and actual death, virtual knowledge and actual war. The future, Berardi argues, has come and gone.

After the Future

The changes taking place in our aesthetic and emotional sensibility: a deep mutation in the psychosphere, caused by semio-capitalism. Franco "Bifo" Berardi's newest book analyzes the contemporary changes taking place in our aesthetic and emotional sensibility--changes the author claims are the result of semio-capitalism's capturing of the inner resources of the subjective process: our experience of time, our sensibility, the way we relate to each other, and our ability to imagine a future. Precarization and fractalization of labor have provoked a deep mutation in the psychosphere, and this can be seen in the rise of psychopathologies such as post-traumatic stress disorder, autism, panic, and attention deficit disorder. Sketching out an aesthetic genealogy of capitalist globalization, Berardi shows how we have arrived at a point of such complexity in the semiotic flows of capital that we can no longer process its excessive currents of information. A swarm effect now rules: it has become impossible to say "no." Social behavior is trapped in inescapable patterns of interaction coded by techno-linguistic machines, smartphones, screens of every size, and all of these sensory and emotional devices end up destroying our organism's sensibility by submitting it to the stress of competition and acceleration. Arguing for disentanglement rather than resistance, Berardi concludes by evoking the myth of La Malinche, the daughter of a noble Aztec family. It is a tale of a translator and traitor who betrayed her own people, yet what the myth portends is the rebirth of the world from the collapse of the old.

Phenomenology of the End : Sensibility and Connective Mutation

"Poetry is the language of nonexchangeability, the return of infinite hermeneutics, and the return of the sensuous body of language. I'm talking about poetry here as an excess of language, a hidden resource which enables us to shift from one paradigm to another."--P. [4] of cover.

On Poetry and Finance

The Uprising

Erik Empson

In this groundbreaking new text, Berardi argues that the story of human society is that of bifurcations. The fundamental one is always between machines for liberating desire and methods of control over the imaginary. In our time of digital mutation, technical automatisms are taking control of the social psyche.

Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-alpha Generation

Precarious Rhapsody

We have entered the gates to the apocalypse. This theological concept is the best metaphor to describe the world in which we are already living in. Chaos is all around us: political folly, economical delirium, ecological catastrophe, intellectual cynicism, technological simulation of life. This is what Franco Berardi suggests in this wry, dark, disconcerting but also brilliant and invigorating journey through the main events that we have witnessed in recent years. One century after the Communist revolution, the very idea that the world could be changed for the better seems dead once and for all. Every time that a new change occurs nowadays, it seems to be a change for the worse. But the fact that nothing can save us anymore shouldn’t be seen as a form of surrender or fatality. On the contrary, if our world is dead, then the space is open for another to appear – a world where apocalypse can shake us out of our contemporary zombie-like existence. The second coming of communism will have nothing to do with 1917. Apocalypse has to be conceived of as a metaphor, and communism is a metaphor too: the metaphor of the possible deployment of the possibilities of the mind.

The Second Coming

La perspectiva de la “futurabilidad” pone de relieve la multiplicidad de futuros posibles inscriptos en la actual conformación del mundo. Si hoy el despliegue de los acontecimientos se nos presenta como inevitable, es porque el código capitalista traduce las dinámicas de la innovación a la lógica de la acumulación privada. Bifo señala que para desarrollar otras posibilidades inmanentes es necesario emancipar al conocimiento respecto del paradigma económico vigente y liberar el tiempo humano de las limitaciones del trabajo asalariado por medio de la tecnología. La redistribución de la riqueza, el fin de la tiranía de las finanzas y de la precariedad solo serán posibles cuando los trabajadores cognitivos del mundo, responsables de la actual programación de la maquinaria social, sean capaces de reprogramarla para que sirva a los intereses de la mayoría. No podemos cambiar la sociedad del modo en que intentaron hacerlo las revoluciones políticas de la historia moderna; lo que sí podemos es construir una plataforma tecnológica cooperativa que posibilite el despertar de la conciencia común de millones de ingenieros, artistas y científicos del mundo.

Futurabilidad

Hedi El Kholti

Semiotext(e)

Neuro-totalitarianism in Technomaya Goog-colonization of the Experience and Neuro-plastic Alternative

storia di una radio sovversiva

Alice è il diavolo

yabancılaşmadan otonomiye

Ruh işbaşında

Massimiliano Geraci

Morte ai vecchi

Podemos llegar a cualquier punto del mundo, pero, más importante aún, desde cualquier punto podemos ser alcanzados. La privacidad y sus posibilidades son abolidas. La atención es cercada por todas partes. No silencio sino ruido ininterrumpido, no el desierto rojo, sino un espacio cognitivo sobrecargado con incentivos nerviosos para actuar: esta es la alienación de nuestro tiempo... El capital ha logrado superar el dualismo del cuerpo y el alma estableciendo una fuerza de trabajo en la que todo lo que queremos decir con el alma —lenguaje, creatividad, afectos— es movilizado para su propio beneficio. La producción industrial puso a trabajar los cuerpos, los músculos y los brazos. Ahora, en la esfera de la tecnología digital y la cibercultura, la explotación involucra la mente, el lenguaje y las emociones con el fin de generar valor —mientras nuestros cuerpos desaparecen frente a la pantalla. En este nuevo libro, Franco Berardi Bifo —miembro clave del movimiento autonomista italiano y un estrecho colaborador de Félix Guattari— aborda estas nuevas formas de extrañamiento. En el paisaje filosófico de las décadas de 1960 y 1970, el concepto hegeliano de la alienación fue utilizado para definir la captura de la subjetividad. El extrañamiento de los trabajadores de su labor, la sensación de alienación que experimentaron, y su negación a someterse a ello se convirtieron en las bases para una comunidad humana que permaneció autónoma del capital. Pero hoy una nueva condición de alienación se ha arraigado en la cual los trabajadores común y voluntariamente trabajan horas extras, la población está atada a sus teléfonos celulares, la deuda se ha convertido en una forma posmoderna de la esclavitud, y los antidepresivos son comúnmente usados para cumplir con la incesante presión de la producción. Las condiciones para la comunidad han encallado y nuevas categorías filosóficas son necesarias. El trabajo del alma es un llamado de atención por un nuevo esfuerzo colectivo para recuperar la felicidad.

de la alienación a la autonomía

El trabajo del alma

Second Coming

What is the relationship between capitalism and mental health? Through an exhilarating mix of philosophical and psychoanalytical theory and reportage - from the suicide epidemic in Korea to the wave of American mass murders - the prominent Italian thinker Franco Berardi Bifo traces the social roots of the mental malaise of our age. His darkest and most unsettling book to date, Berardi proposes dystopian irony as a strategy to disentangle ourselves from the deadly embrace of the neoliberalism.

Mass Murder and Suicide

Heroes

Marco Jacquemet

Gianfranco Vitali

Focusing on the recent Italian "videocracy," this book documents the emergence of the first Italian media mogul, Silvio Berlusconi, and his rise to and recent fall from political power. It also explores Italian media activism through three case studies: a discussion of the first autonomous free radio station, Radio Alice (which broadcasted in Bologna between 1977 and 1979); a review of Italian Internet activism focusing on a political site, Rekombinant.org(created in 2000); and finally a chronicle of the emergence in 2002 of OrfeoTV, the first Italian example of an illegal micro-TV station.

Communication and Power in Contemporary Italy

Ethereal Shadows

Franco « Bifo » Berardi s’intéresse ici à la psychopathologie, mais aussi aux origines économiques et politiques de ces meurtres de masse de plus en plus fréquents. Il démêle minutieusement l’enchevêtrement de désespoir, de ressentiment, de nihilisme, d’affirmation identitaire et de quête de célébrité qui pousse ces hommes à faucher la vie des autres avant de mettre fin à la leur.

Forcenés et suicidaires à l'ère du capitalisme absolu

Tueries

Asfixia – capitalismo financeiro e a insurreição da linguagem reúne dois textos de Franco Berardi: Insurreição (2011) e Respiração (2018). Em Insurreição, o autor de Depois do Futuro, realiza uma espécie de manifesto para tempos precários, um chamado para a ação diante da crise catastrófica que o capitalismo financeiro impõe a todos. Para Berardi, a sociedade ou pode seguir as prescrições e "resgates" exigidos pelos setores econômico e financeiro às custas da felicidade pública, da cultura e do bem comum; ou pode arriscar formular uma alternativa. Mais do que entender a crise atual como uma crise econômica, Bifo propõe que o que está em jogo é uma crise da imaginação social, que exige uma nova linguagem para enfrentá-la. Em Respiração, o autor retoma a metáfora da poesia como rota de fuga contra os fluxos que paralisam o corpo social. Segundo Berardi, trata-se de reaprender a respirar em tempos de asfixia: "Como podemos lidar com a falta de ar que a abstração produziu na história da humanidade? Como podemos nos desvencilhar do cadáver do capitalismo financeirizado?". Para ele, a resposta pode estar na potência infinita de uma linguagem não coagida pelos limites do significado ou, em outras palavras, na poesia como invenção coletiva.

Asfixia – capitalismo financeiro e a insurreição da linguagem

Berardi draws an image of contemporary Italy as "Berlusconiland," where the Italian language has been debased, and the policies of "Mafia media moguls" permeate culture like a "psychopoison."

Franco Berardi

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