Radical media, politics and culture.

Franco "Bifo" Berardi, "Almost Telegraphic"

Almost Telegraphic Franco "Bifo" Berardi

Many things to say and little time to say them.

1. A look at the scene late in the first decade. The hope Obama is dissolved and the European crisis erupts. A new logic is installed in the heart of European life from the Greek financial crisis: Merkel, Sarkozy and Trichet have decided that European society must sacrifice their current living standards, the public education system, its civilization, to pay the debts accumulated by the financial elite. A kind of directory has been taken over the Union, reaffirming the bankrupt dogmas of neoliberal monetarism: reduced labor costs, cuts in social spending, privatization of education, impoverishment of everyday life. Projecting the shadow of a long-term recession on the future of the last generation it has become blackmail. While the horizon looks dark in the European theater events are also produced unpredictable, disturbing and exciting at the same time. I see the horsemen of the apocalypse and I like the sound of galloping horses.

2. Wikileaks has demonstrated the power of collective intelligence. Assange The event is orchestrated by the irradiation of the creative force of the general intellect. The lesson of Wikileaks is not revealed in the content, we knew that the diplomats are paid to lie and that the military get paid for shooting civilians, as in the activation of solidarity, complicity and collaboration between independent partimers between cognitive workers of various kinds: hardware technicians, programmers, journalists who work together and share the same goal of destabilizing the totalitarian power. From this lesson, the rebels find their way to self-organization of the general intellect.

3. The general intellect is looking for a body. The revolt spread through the streets of Europe, from Rome to London and Athens, but the street is not the only language of this movement. What is at stake in the mass revolt of December? The rebels are well aware that is not preparing a military struggle against the police and the state. They are not very interested in the police and the state. What you are looking for is a restructuring of the social body and a revival of the general intellect erotic body. In the past ten years, the precariousness, isolation and competition in the labor market have led to a decoupling of the collective intelligence of the social network of knowledge work. The acceleration of the infosphere (intensification of the rate of cognitive operation) has been the psycho-social tension, leading to loneliness, panic, depression, dis-empathy. The sensitivity and the desire to want their flow. The first generation that has learned more words from a machine that reconstructs his mother's body on the streets.

4. A long-term process. The students' struggles are not a passing burst, but the beginning of a period that marked the next decade, a revolt in Europe. Insurrection means standing up, but full deployment of the potentialities of the actor. The actor on the historical stage is the general intellect subjective process. Unlocking the potential of the general intellect goes far beyond the limits of capitalism and implies a recovery of sensitivity. The sensitivity, ability to understand what can not be verbalized, has been devastated by the precariousness and fractalisation time. To reactivate the sensitivity, art, therapy and political action tend to melt.

Prozac, Ritalin, cocaine and competition have produced bipolar effects in the economy: irrational exuberance of the markets, financial panic ... and also in the psycho-social, mass depression, panic attacks, suicide epidemic. The therapy has been reduced to the rehabilitation of the mind depressed to normal mental exploitation.

5. The fusion of art and activism has emphasized the ineffectiveness of the gesture. The movement is not global in the past decade was a purely ethical movement, deprived of political purposes, unable to stop trends of capitalist deregulation because it entered the sphere of everyday life , and was limited to the ethics complaint and symbolic action. The art-ivismo has internalized the inefficiency and the transformation of pure action complaint.

At best, the art of the past decade has been phenomenology of mental suffering. I think artists like Lisa Athila, Jonatahan Franzen, Melinda July, Gus Van Sant, Kim Ki Duk, who stage the social body and the frantic fragmented time perception induced by instability. Mental suffering is the main area of contact between art and social action at the time that the general intellect starts looking for a body. The rebels are now launching a poetic action and self-therapy. They are piecing together the empathy of the bodies, rediscovering a common area of sensitivity.

6. No more cynicism. In the center of the current uprising is a strong ethical foundation. I do not think an ethics based on "values", I do not know what they are. I think ethics in terms of materialistic, hedonistic, sensual and self-respect and self-love. The concept of the aesthetic sphere to redefine the ethical sphere. The cynicism of the masses, which according Sloterdjik was the prevailing sentiment in the post-68, is off course because it no longer pays. The masses accept the sadness of cynicism and self-humiliating submission to the rules of power if it is guaranteed income. But today the allocation cynicism is only the ruling class and increasingly permeates less in mass culture. Cynical class has lost its glamor. Ugly, filthy, disgusting are those who are in command posts of finance, politics, economics, from the point of view of the new generation. It is an aesthetic view, before anything else. The ethical choice is based on self-pleasure, not universal values, but the pleasure of singularity. Different perceptions of wealth, and enjoy themselves rather than acquisition, is making its way in feeling, even before the conscience.

7. After Europe. The financial disease has devastated the body and soul of European society, so that Europe is now a zombie. The cognitive work insurgent movement has the task of inventing a new Europe, freed from the dogmas of competition and accumulation. Europe reborn with the emergence of social and erotic body of the general intellect, through the sensual intelligence insurrection movement. Then Europe will be a place of solidarity and beauty.

December 19, 2010