Cognitarian Subjectivation

8/13/2019 Cognitarian Subjectivation

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Franco Berardi Bifo

CognitarianSubjectivation

Recent years have witnessed a new techno-social framework of contemporarysubjectivation. And I would like to ask whether aprocess of autonomous, collective self-definitionis possible in the present age. The concept ofÒgeneral intellectÓ associated with Italian post-operaist thought in the 1990s (Paolo Virno,Maurizio Lazzarato, Christian Marazzi)emphasizes the interaction between labor and

language: social labor is the endlessrecombination of myriad fragments producing,elaborating, distributing, and decoding signs andinformational units of all kinds. Every semioticsegment produced by the information workermust meet and match innumerable othersemiotic segments in order to form thecombinatory frame of the info-commodity,semiocapital.

Semiocapital puts neuro-psychic energiesto work, submitting them to mechanistic speed,compelling cognitive activity to follow the rhythm

of networked productivity. As a result, theemotional sphere linked with cognition isstressed to its limit. Cyberspace overloadscybertime, because cyberspace is an unboundedsphere whose speed can accelerate withoutlimits, while cybertime (the organic time ofattention, memory, imagination) cannot be spedup beyond a certain point Ð or it cracks. And itactually is cracking, collapsing under the stressof hyper-productivity. An epidemic of panic anddepression is now spreading throughout thecircuits of the social brain. The current crisis inthe global economy has much to do with thisnervous breakdown. Marx spoke ofoverproduction, meaning the excess of availablegoods that could not be absorbed by the socialmarket. But today it is the social brain that isassaulted by an overwhelming supply ofattention-demanding goods. The social factoryhas become the factory of unhappiness: theassembly line of networked production is directlyexploiting the emotional energy of the cognitiveclass.

I wish to pinpoint the problem of organiclimits, which is often eclipsed by an emphasis onthe limitless potential of technology. We shouldspeak of technology in context, and the presentcontext of technology is culturally orientedtowards economic competition. Info-producersare neuro-workers. Their nervous systems act asactive receiving terminals. They are sensitive tosemiotic activation throughout the entire day.What emotional, psychic, existential price doesthe constant cognitive stress of permanentcognitive electrocution exact? The accelerationof network technologies, the general condition ofprecariousness, and the dependence on

cognitive labor all induce pathological effects inthe social mind, saturating attention time,

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compressing the sphere of emotion andsensitivity, as is shown by psychiatrists who haveobserved a steep increase in manic depressionand suicide in the last generation of workers. The colonization of time has been afundamental issue in the modern history ofcapitalist development: the anthropologicalmutation that capitalism produced in the humanmind and in daily life has, above all, transformed

the perception of time. But we are now leapinginto the unknown Ð digital technologies haveenabled absolute acceleration, and the short-circuiting of attention time. As info-workers areexposed to a growing mass of stimuli that cannotbe dealt with according to the intensivemodalities of pleasure and knowledge,acceleration leads to an impoverishment ofexperience. More information, less meaning.More information, less pleasure. Sensibility is activated in time. Sensuality isslow. Deep, intense elaboration becomes

impossible when the stimulus is too fast. Aprocess of desensitization is underway at thepoint where electronic cyberspace intersectswith organic cybertime. The prospect ofindividual subjectivation, and of socialsubjectivation, has to be reframed in thiscontext, and a series of radical questions arise:

Is it still possible to envisage a process ofcollective subjectivation and social solidarity? Isit still possible to imagine a ÒmovementÓ in thesense of a collective process of intellectual andpolitical transformation of reality? Is it stillpossible to forge social autonomy from capitalistdominance in the psycho-economic frameworkof semiocapitalism?

Dismantling General IntellectThe refusal of work Ð which is better defined as arefusal of the alienation and exploitation of livingtime Ð has been the main engine of innovation, oftechnological development and knowledge. Theorganic composition of capital (as a relationshipbetween dead labor and living labor)progressively changed throughout the twentiethcentury as the workersÕ resistance, theirsabotage and insubordination, forced capitaliststo hire engineers to replace human labor withmachines. Similarly, the intellectualization of

human activity is Ð from any perspective Ð aconsequence of the workersÕ insubordination andresistance to exploitation. When the cost of laborincreases (as happened in the 1960s and Õ70s),the capitalist replaces worker with machine, asthe machine is less costly in the long run. Sincethe massive wave of industrial workersÕ

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resistance, information technology has helped toreplace human toil with intelligent machines,and this has provoked the enhancement of thesphere of intellectual labor and cognitive activitylinked to value production. The Õ90s were a decade of alliances:cognitive labor and venture capital met andmerged in the dot-com. Expectations were high, judging by the amount of investment, and

creativity became an inherent feature of sociallabor. Then, after the dot-com bubble burst inspring of 2000, neoliberalism broke the allianceof cognitive labor and venture capital. Usingtechnology itself, neoliberalism managed tosubvert the social and political rapport de forcebetween labor and capital. As far as we can seenow, the result of neoliberal politics is a generalreduction of labor cost and an impoverishment ofthe cognitarians. Both industrial labor,delocalized to the peripheral areas of the world,and cognitive labor, are devalued and underpaid,

as precarization has fragmented and finallydestroyed social solidarity. In this new context,defined by precarization of cognitive labor, wemust rethink the question of subjectivation. Just after the financial collapse of spring2000, the dot-com crash and the crumbling of bigcorporations like Enron and WorldCom, the Swiss

philosopher and economist Christian Marazzi, asharp analyst of the social implications offinancial crises, wrote an article on the danger ofprivatizing the general intellect, in which hepredicted the trend that ten years later is in fullswing: the reduction of research financing, themanipulation and militarization of state-financed research, and the impoverishment andprecarization of cognitive labor. 1

If we look at the politics of the Europeanneoliberal ruling class, we see that they aredoing exactly this: in some countries (such asItaly) they are reducing the financing for schooland for research, privatizing public schools, andprovoking a large-scale de-scholarization thathas already begun showing signs of producingwidespread ignorance and fanaticism. In somecountries (like France), they increasingly limit thepublic financing of research to that which canimmediately translate into the politics ofeconomic growth. Subjugating research to

immediate economic interests reduces the roleof research, rendering it a mere tool forgovernance, for the repetition of an existingframework of social activity. As cognitive workersare forced into precarity, they are also denied thepossibility of deciding the scope of their ownresearch. This obviously reduces the creativity

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invested by cognitarians in their work, as well asthe pace of innovation and progress intechnology. In the long run, this trend obliterates theprogressive features of capitalism. As the cost oflabor becomes so low that exploiting the physicalforce of a worker costs less than looking forsome technological replacement, the pushtoward innovation slows to a halt. The interest in

immediate profit prevails over the long-termdevelopment of productive force.Notwithstanding the shortsighted opinionsprevailing in the field of neoliberal economics, adecrease in labor cost suggest that theprogressive impulse of capitalism is fading;capitalism becomes a factor of de-civilization, ofintellectual and technological regression.

Cognitarians Searching for a BodyCognitarians are those who embody the generalintellect in its many forms: they process

information in order to give birth to goods andservices. As the cognitive function of society isinscribed in the process of capital valorization,the infinitely fragmented mosaic of cognitiveactivity becomes a fluid process within auniversal telematic network, redefining theshape of labor and capital. Capital becomes the

generalized semiotic flux that runs through theveins of the global economy, while laborbecomes the constant activation of theintelligence of countless semiotic agents linkedto one another. Cognitarians are the social body of the soulat work in the sphere of semiocapital, but thisbody is dimidiated in a sphere isolated from theotherÕs body. The form of alienation that is

spreading in the living sphere of the cognitariansis a form of psychic suffering that escapes theFreudian definition of neurosis. If FreudÕsdefinition of neurosis lingered on repression ofdesire, semiocapital is pushing demand forconsumerist hyper-expression: just do it. Panic,depression, and a de-activation of empathy Ð itis here that we find the cognitariatÕs problem. Precarious cognitive workers are forced tothink in terms of competition. You can becomefriends with another person on Facebook, butgenuine friendship is difficult under conditions

of virtual isolation and intense economiccompetition. If we want to find the way towardsautonomous collective subjectivation we have togenerate cognitarian awareness with regard toan erotic, social body of the general intellect. Theway to autonomous and collective subjectivationstarts here: from the general intellect searching

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for a body.Our main political task must be handled

with the conceptual tools of psychotherapy, andthe language of poetry Ð much more than thelanguage of politics and the conceptual tools ofmodern political science. The political organizerof cognitarians must be able to do away withpanic and depression, to speak in a way thatsensibly enacts a paradigm shift, a

resemiotization of the social field, a change insocial expectations and self-perception. We areforced to acknowledge that we do have a body, asocial and a physical body, a socioeconomicbody.

Cyber-optimists were fashionable in theÕ90s, and they were able to interpret the spirit ofan alliance between venture capitalists andartists or engineers. But the alliance was brokenin the Bush years, when technology wassubmitted to the laws of war, and financialcapitalism provoked a collapse that may still

lead to the destruction of modern civilization.Today, cyber-optimism sounds fake, likeadvertising for a rotten product. In his recentbook, You Are Not a Gadget , Jaron Lanier, thesame person who engineered the tools of virtualreality, writes:

true believers in the hive mind seem tothink that no number of layers ofabstraction in a financial system can dullthe efficacy of the system. According to thenew ideology, which is a blending of cyber-cloud and neoÐMilton Friedmaneconomics, the market will not only do itsbest, it will do better the less peopleunderstand it. I disagree. The financialcrisis brought about by the U.S. mortgagemeltdown of 2008 was a case of too manypeople believing in the cloud too much. 2

Governance and Cognitive SubjugationIn the present, agonizing phase of neoliberalism(an agony that is more ferocious and destructivethan the previous phases) Europeangovernments are staging an assault on theeducational system Ð and particularly onscientific research Ð as a part of a war againstcognitive labor, a war aimed at its subjugation.The university system across Europe is based ona huge amount of precarious, underpaid, orunpaid labor. Researchers and students havestaged protests against this trend, attempting toreturn the educational system to its originalvocation: a place of non-dogmatic knowledge, ofthe public sharing of culture. Research shouldnot be subjected to any restraining criterion of

functionality, because its very function is toexplore solutions that, although dysfunctional in

the present paradigm, may reveal newparadigmatic landscapes. This is the role ofscientific research, especially when we arefacing conundrums that seem unresolvablewithin the capitalist paradigm.

The European ruling class aims to reduceresearch to a method for the governance ofcomplexity. The ideology of governance is basedon the naturalization (hypostatization, I would

say in Hegelian parlance) of economic reasoning.The economy has achieved the status of auniversal language, of the ultimate standard ofchoice, whereas economics should be just abranch of knowledge among others. Thenormative role that the economy has acquired isunwarranted from an epistemological point ofview, and devastating at the social level. Ifresearch is subjected to economicconceptualization, it is no longer research, buttechnical management. The so-called reform ofthe European educational system launched in

1999 (the year of the Bologna Charter) is aimedat the separation of applied research from thequestioning of the very foundations and finalitiesof scientific knowledge, accompanied by thesubjugation of research to standards set byeconomic evaluation. The epistemic implications of this move areenormous: to submit research to the laws ofeconomic growth obliterates the most importantpurpose of knowledge, what Thomas Kuhn callsits ÒparadigmaticÓ function. The ability toproduce paradigm shifts in the field ofknowledge and in the field of experimentationdepends on the autonomy of research fromestablished standards of evaluation. Only whenresearch can work and discover and createconcepts regardless of established socialinterests can knowledge move beyond repetition,and open new prospects to imagination andtechnology.

ÒGovernanceÓ is the keyword for thisprocess. Governance produces pure functionalitywithout meaning, the automation of thought andof will. It embeds abstract connections in therelation between living organisms,technologically subjecting choices to logicalconcatenation. It recombines compatible(compatibilized) fragments of knowledge.Governance is the replacement of political willwith a system of automatic technicalities forcingreality into a logical framework that cannot bequestioned. Financial stability, competitiveness,labor cost reduction, increase of productivity:the systemic architecture of EU rule is based onsuch dogmatic foundations that cannot bechallenged or discussed, because they areembedded in the technical function of

managerial subsystems. No enunciation oraction is operational if it does not comply with

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embedded rules of techno-linguistic dispositifsof daily exchange. Governance is the management of a systemthat is too complex to be governed. The wordÒgovernmentÓ means the understanding (as areduction to a rational model) of the social world,and the ability of the human will (despotic,democratic, and so forth) to control a flow ofinformation sufficient for the control of a

relevant part of the social whole. The possibilityof government requires a low degree ofcomplexity with regard to social information.Information complexity grew throughout the latemodern age, and exploded in the age of thedigital network. Therefore, the reduction of socialinformation to comprehensive knowledge andpolitical control becomes an impossible task:control becomes aleatory, uncertain, almostimpossible, and an increasing number of eventsescape the organized will.

At this point, capitalism shifts to the mode

of governance. It employs abstractconcatenation of technological functions in placeof the conscious processing of a flow ofinformation. It connects asignifying segments inplace of dialogic elaboration. It automaticallyadapts in place of forming consensus, usingtechnical language in place of shared meaning

resulting from dialogue and conflict. In place ofplanning, it manages disruption. It assesses thecompatibility of agents entering the social gamein place of mediating conflicting politicalinterests and projects. And it employs therhetoric of systemic complexity in place of arhetoric of historical dialectics.

Looking for Autonomy

As the governance model functions perfectly, initself, it destroys the social body.Conceptualizing the field of cybernetics, NorbertWiener argued that a system exhibiting positivefeedback, in response to perturbation, increasesthe magnitude of perturbation. In contrast, asystem that responds to a perturbation in a waythat reduces its effect is said to exhibit negativefeedback. A logic of positive feedback is installed inthe connection between digital technology andfinancial economy, because this connection

tends to induce technological automatisms, andpsycho-automatisms too, leading to theadvancement of destructive tendencies. Look atthe discourse of the European political class(almost without exception): If deregulationproduced the systemic collapse with which theglobal economy is now confronted, we need more

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deregulation. If lower taxation on high incomesled to a fall in demand, letÕs lower high-incometaxation. If hyper-exploitation resulted in theoverproduction of unsold and useless cars, letÕsintensify car production.

Are these people insane? I donÕt think so. Ithink they are incapable of thinking in terms ofthe future; they are panicking, terrorized by theirown impotence; they are scared. The modern

bourgeoisie was a strongly territorialized class,linked to material assets; it could not existwithout a relationship to territory andcommunity. The financial class that dominatesthe contemporary scene has no attachment toeither territory or material production, becauseits power and wealth are founded on the perfectabstraction of a digitally multiplied finance.

And this digital-financial hyper-abstractionis liquidating the living body of the planet, andthe social body. Only the social force of thegeneral intellect can reset the machine and

initiate a paradigm shift, but this presupposesthe autonomy of the general intellect, the socialsolidarity of cognitarians. It presupposes aprocess of autonomous subjectivation ofcollective intelligence. !

All images by ISTUBALZ

Franco Berardi, aka "Bifo," founder of the famous"Radio Alice" in Bologna and an important figure of theItalian Autonomia Movement, is a writer, mediatheorist, and media activist. He currently teachesSocial History of the Media at the Accademia di Brera,Milan.

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1See Christian Marazzi, ÒThePrivatization of the GeneralIntellect,Ó trans. Nicolas Guilhot,http://destructural.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/christia n-marazzi-the-privatization- of-the-general-intellect.pdf .

2Jaron Lanier, You Are Not AGadget (New York: RandomHouse, 2010), 97.

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Cognitarian Subjectivation

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