Translated by Liz Mason-Deese
With almost a dozen books published in Spanish, Bifo, far from being an unknown author in South America, has become an esteemed source of inspiration. For those who do not know him, this activist philosopher from Bologna, who is close to 70 years old, is a prolific author whose work has been published in Argentina with great interest by several publishing houses (Cruce, Tinta Limón, Cactus, Hethk, Caja Negra). Bifo is one of the paradigmatic figures of the young Italian autonomist movement (also known as operaismo): he was one of the protagonists of the Italian 1968 movement – which in Italy extended until 1977 –, he founded the historical magazine A/traverso and the mythical Radio Alice (the first Italian pirate radio station). Translated by small publishing houses and blogs – nodes of authentic networks of active practices in the sphere of pedagogy and activism, of theater and film –, read by hackers and psychoanalysts, communicators and philosophers of technology, his ideas continue to be used and put in connection with diverse situations. He lived in New York for a few years where he got to know cyberpunk up close, and was the creator of TV Orfeo, the first community television channel in Italy. He is currently a professor of Social History of Communication at the Fine Arts Academy of Brera, Milan.
In this conversation, we wanted to know more about the method of plasticity or the “cartographic” method – inherited from Félix Guattari –, and how this mode of work evolved, taking as reference points Bifo’s works published in Argentina: Generación post Alfa, Félix, De la Sublevación, El trabajo del Alma y Fenomenología del fin (published in English as: Precarious Rhapsody; Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship and Visionary Cartography; The Uprising; The Soul at Work; and And: Phenomenology of the End). In his words, the “rhizomatic” method consists of creating a living, never totalizing, cartography of social composition. How can we read Bifo today, from our circumstances? What does his way of working teach us when it comes to taking up situated practices in the particular historical conjuncture in the region – the neoliberalism without crisis in Chile, the limits of so-called progressive politics in Uruguay, the handbook neoliberalism of Durán Barba, key to understanding the Argentine political situation, the emergent techno-fascism in Brazil –? How to link the updating of the cartographic method with the everyday incorporation of new generations of activists in different collectives, organizations, and movements that investigate and experiment beyond neoliberalism, racism, patriarchy, and fascism? How to avoid the harmfulness of simplifications related to desire – that “psychic flow that is activated and de-activated, and which is modified by the cultural, technical, social conditions in which the flows of the imaginary move” – which is key to the force of these movements?
Félix Guattari and the Method of Plasticity
Diego Sztulwark: What was your relationship with Félix Guattari like? How did you meet each other? What do you remember about him? I am referring to his biographical aspects, features of your friendship or companionship.
Franco Berardi: I first came to know Félix through reading his book, Una tomba per Edipo. Psicoanalisi et trasversalità (published in French in 1972 and in Spanish in 1976, selected essays from which were published in different English collections), that left a strong impression on me. I met him personally in June 1977, following my escape from Italy after the insurrection in Bologna in March of that same year. Félix was very enthusiastic about the Italian events of that year. His work started to circulate, especially in Bologna, and the explosion of joyous madness of the metropolitan “Indians” and Radio Alice was influenced by reading Anti-Oedipus.
I arrived in Paris in May 1977, after clandestinely crossing the border between Italy and France. For the first few weeks, some friends hosted me in a house in Avenue de la République. Félix was very friendly toward me from the beginning; in June I called him on the telephone and he immediately invited me to stay in his house in rue de Condé, near Odéon. I lived in that place, a labyrinth of a house with different styles of furniture mixed together, with continuous visits from intellectuals, artists, activists.
In June, they arrested me in Paris while I was walking down the street. The Italian judges were looking for me for the organization of the student revolt in March and they had requested that the French magistrate extradite me to Italy, where 300 of my comrades and most of the Radio Alice team were already imprisoned. During my detention in prison in Fresnes, on the outskirts of Paris, Félix and some of his friends put together a petition requesting the rejection of the extradition order that was signed by many writers. In the process, the judge freed me, recognizing the political character of the accusations. A few days later, Félix and I wrote a text denouncing the repression in Italy that was signed by Sartre, Sollers, Foucault, Barthes, and many other people, and that had a very strong effect on the opinion of the Italian left.
Félix was a nice, generous man, who always seemed a little distracted, like someone who is thinking about something else. Although he was a good bit older than me, I never considered Félix as a father, but always as a brother.
D.S.: In your text, “The Happy Depression” (a chapter in Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship and Visionary Cartography, in Spanish the chapter bears the name: “Depresión Félix”) you refer to his death and point to an aspect of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy about desire. If I understand correctly, you claim that in Anti-Oedipus there was a utopian-juvenile conception of desire, which was later corrected in What Is Philosophy? Could you explain what this “depression” Félix experienced was like from the perspective of his conception of activism? In your text, you link the conception of desire as “aging” (this second position of our philosophers) with the Buddhist wisdom of the impermanence of forms. I would like to hear more about how you think about this reorganization of desire.
F.B.: Reading Anti-Oedipus, for me and for thousands of students and activists in the Italian autonomous movement, increased our conviction that the revolutionary process was destined to expand and continue in time, because it was founded on a dynamic of desire that seemed unstoppable. The problem is that our interpretation of the concept of desire was very simple. You have to understand, I’m not talking about the text’s real complexity, what Guattari and Deleuze understood in their writings, or the complications linked to the relationship between Lacanism and new psychoanalytic practices. No. I want to limit myself to a reflection about the political effect of our reading. Starting in 1977, while I was in Paris living in Félix’s house, I participated in the activity at CINEL (Centre d’Initiative pour de Nouveaux Espaces de Liberté) where I played a role of linking the Italian movement and the Parisian philosophical laboratory. But I have to confess that I am not happy with the way that function developed. We focused our theoretical attention on the concept of desire, and desire seemed to be an uncontainable force that was only waiting to be unleashed to later overwhelm all forms of repression and exploitation.
It was a very simplistic vision on the philosophical plane, and dangerous politically. It was simplistic because it reduced desire to a natural force, naturally good and progressive. But it is not: desire is not a natural force but rather a psychic flow that is activated and de-activated, and which is modified by the cultural, technical, social conditions in which the flows of the imaginary move. What I think I have understood is that desire is not a unifying liberating or positive force, but rather it is the field on which subjective forces are formed, where they collide, win, and lose their battles. The starting point of Guattarian discourse consists of the affirmation that desire is not a lack and that its dynamic is not that of necessity, but of the creation of imaginative worlds. But the way in which this dynamic is manifested and the imaginative contents that desire produces can be very different.
Starting in 1977, the modes of formation of the desiring field changed drastically. The autonomous, egalitarian flows, that in the 1970s had manifested under the form of social autonomy, were invested and transformed in an individualist and competitive sense in the following years, the years of the liberal counter-revolution. This evolution had already been predicted and developed in the 1970s by Jean Baudrillard. But Baudrillard was seen with a certain suspicion from the Guattarian environment. I read his books in the early 1980s, precisely when the social and technical transformation identified by liberalism starts to unfold. And my vision of the relation between desire and processes of subjectivation started to change.
The triumphalist vision of desire, the emphasis on the liberating character of desiring energy, prevented us from elaborating a discourse about depression. In effect, the issue of depression remained on the margins of Guattarian reflection, even when Félix suffered from depression in various occasions, especially in the winter years, the 1980s.
D.S.: Félix Guattari had an intense and changing relationship with psychoanalysis, especially with Lacan, with whom he was closely linked. What was his relation with Lacan like? What can we say about schizoanalysis today and how would you bring the differences between both analytical orientations up-to-date?
F.B.: I must confess that I did not know Lacan before my encounter with Félix, therefore my successive reading of him has been very influenced by the Guattarian critique. I don’t know much about Félix’s relation with Lacan. When I met him, in 1977, this relationship had been over for some time and I don’t think that we ever talked about Lacan. At that moment, we were going through an intense moment politically and we were focusing on issues related to the campaign against repression in Italy, the petition signed by Parisian intellectuals against repressive policy, that convoked an international colloquium to be held in Bologna in September.
Félix himself chose who to ask their signature and adhesion. It was noteworthy that the petition was not signed by Lacan but I think it was because Guattari had decided not to contact him. What does Guattari and Deleuze’s critique of Lacanism consist of? It is a complicated question. To respond, I would suggest a reference to an article that Guattari published in 1972, in the magazine Change International, “Machine et Structure” (published in English in Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, 1984). In this article, Guattari demonstrates his dissatisfaction with the Lacanian reduction of the unconscious to structure, and proposes shifting attention to the machine, or rather the technical and semiotic concatenation that modifies the field in which the unconscious acts.
I never understood what the personal relationship was like between Félix and Lacan after that philosophical rupture. What seems decisive to me, in the plane of the psychoanalytic relation, is that for Guattari the role of the analyst is concentrated more on refocusing than on interpreting. Refocusing, or the practical displacement of the focus of attention and investment, is an action that concerns the relation between a person and their communicative and affective environment, their social landscape. In this way, Guattari distanced himself from the predominance of the interpretative function under Freud, to propose schizoanalysis, which consists of refocusing the landscape, the projects, the very obsessions and deliriums of the subject of schizoanalysis. Schizoanalysis proposes following the schizo in their psychotic journey to make possible, from within the delirium, the encounter with new possible concatenations that allow getting away from obsessive refrains, and, in that way, finding happy collective refrains, capable of sustaining the dynamic of chaosmosis.[i]
The root of the problem, however, lies in the fact that since the 1980s, the territory of the imaginary has changed dramatically. In the conditions created by the new reticular technology and the explosion of liberalism, the mobilization of the psyche – constantly solicited by new forms of capital, by the permanent stimulation of advertising, by the media assault – led to the current panicked destructuring of the unconscious. In the universe of over-stimulation, the problem of schizoanalysis is also redefined.
The desiring thought emerges in 1969 and 1970 as the questioning of a dimension of collective existence that, following the Situationist’s critique, is dominated by boredom. The technical mutation produced by neoliberalism and the internet displaces this social dimension of boredom toward a prevalence of anxiety. The psychopathological picture changes in such a radical way that the desiring triumphalism, which we first encountered in Anti-Oedipus, ended up turning into a useful force for liberal deregulation and hyper-consumption. In their later works, particular What Is Philosophy? And in Chaosmosis, Deleuze and Guattari start to speak about a chaotic and painful side of desire. The must current text in this sense is the last chapter of this final book: “From Chaos to the Brain.” The problematic of chaos, of psychic suffering that this carried with it, the strategies of relation with chaos open up a new phase in Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking, although this phase would quickly end, as Félix dies in 1992 and Deleuze a few years later.
D.S.: In regards to Guattari’s political positions, how did his Marxism evolve from an activist or militant point of view?
F.B.: Guattari was part of a Trotskyist group in the years following 1968, but we must bear in mind that the definition of Trotskyist in France is very broad and imprecise: a way of saying non-orthodox Marxist, non-Stalinist communist. Baudrillard, who is so different from Guattari, had also been a Trotskyist in the 1960s, which does not say much about his philosophical training.
Guattari’s Marxism was not reducible to the range of Orthodox, Leninist, Maoist, Trotskyist, Council Marxisms. For him, as well as for Deleuze, it was not about determining a correct version or an updated application of Marx’s thought, but of conceptualizing the dimension of subjectivity that was lacking in Marx’s work.
Capital ends with an unfinished chapter, of which Marx wrote only the title (“Classes”) and a few lines. It is the never written Chapter 52, in which Marx would have had to elaborate the question of class not only as an economic object, but also as a political, historical subject. Marx never developed that concept that remains a hole in the general texture of his thought.
It is in the emptiness of this hole that the history of the revolutionary movement and the passage from the First to the Second International develops. There was, on the one hand, a more deterministic interpretation, that of Engels and German social democracy, and, on the other, a more voluntarist interpretation that manifested with the formation of Lenin’s Bolshevik party. In the first case, the working class is the effect of the industrial productive transformation, and its political maturation coincides with the development of the productive forces, with the growing concentration of capital, and the massification of industrial labor. In the second, the concept of the working class implies the Hegelian relation between an sich and fur sich, that is, between the objective dimension of labor, the materiality of economic relations, and the subjective dimension: the workers’ political consciousness, mediated by the party or incorporated into the party.
Deleuze and Guattari’s thought can be situated within the sphere of Marxism as a reconfiguration of the problem of subjectivity, beyond the alternative between economic determinism and political voluntarism. Subjectivity stops being something that is economically determined, but nor is it a pure effect of political will. The subjective dimension starts to be understood as something that is concrete but not determined. Class struggle also has to understand desire, which means the social unconscious, psychological suffering, and the concatenations of enunciation. Guattari never raised the issue of establishing a new Marxist orthodoxy, he only proposed illustrating the processes of subjectivation that transform the objective condition of the social forces into actors of collective enunciation.
D.S.: In the last years of his life, Guattari goes from the idea of transversality to that of “metamodelization.” Perhaps this practical intuition summarizes much of his trajectory. What is metamodelization? What is its importance for practices today, according to your criteria?
F.B.: It seems that the concept of metamodelization has something to do with what Gregory Bateson discusses in his essay on schizophrenia, Steps Toward an Ecology of Mind. Schizoanalysis, Félix says, does not consist of imitating schizophrenia, but of escaping (as the schizo does) the borders of meaning, of the established meaning, in order to expand one’s vision, to reach the a-signifying dimension as a possibility of recontextualization of psychosis and normality, of the relation between psychosis and normality.
Bateson says that the schizophrenic does not recognize the quotation marks in the metaphor, and takes it as reality. In this sense, the schizo is a metamodeler. The work of schizoanalysis consists of this: taking the metaphor seriously, expanding the territory of meaning, to the point of involving and understanding the a-signifying. Metamodeling means transcending the modeled dimension (what is understandable within the field of the signified) to comprehend what does not belong to the signified. Metamodelization, then, is an expansion of the analytical frame that allows, as Guattari says in Chaosmosis, for recharging meaning.
D.S.: In your work Phenomenology of the End, you make reference to a “rhizomatic” or “cartographic method.” What is that, how does it work, and what role does it play in your current practice?
F.B.: Rhizomatic or cartographic, both terms go together. There is no way of talking about the rhizome that is not cartographic, that is not an infinite phenomenology of the rhizome that is irreducible to a totalization.
D.S.: Again, thinking about Guattari and also about you, what role does the traditional of Italian workerism play in your ways of thinking? It is very different, we know, but perhaps you could briefly describe what it is for each of you. We know of Guattari’s friendship and collaboration with Toni Negri. A little bit of what François Dosse narrates in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives.
F.B.: The encounter between what is known as Italian workerism and what is known as French post-structuralism is not only a biographic or merely a political event. There is a philosophical convergence that has to be investigated. After 1977, many Italian intellectuals fled to France and the support network that Guattari had built with his collaborators (CINEL, Centre d’Initiative pour de Nouveaux Espaces de Liberté), was very important in that conjuncture for developing a common theoretical discourse. But what I am interested in highlighting is the common methodology that for me is identified through the concept of “social composition.”
Workerist and post-structuralist thought converge in their common attention to the molecular process (to use Guattari’s terms) and the everydayness and spontaneity of the refusal of work. Class struggle is first and foremost a process linked to social, technical, and cultural composition. And processes of the psyche – that is Guattari’s specific contribution –. Subjectivity is the territory of the convergence of flows from the field of the economy, of culture, of the unconscious.
D.S.: To understand this encounter between so-called French post-structuralist (Deleuze, Guattari, Foucuault) and Italian workerism it is necessary to return to the different ways of reading Marx that you mentioned.
F.B.: We have to return to what I was saying before: during the 20th century two general directions were defined based on Marx’s work. The first is the humanist, historicist tradition, which is found in thinkers like those of the Frankfurt School. This tradition emphasizes the works of young Marx, still enmeshed in a theological and Hegelian vision. The second is the structuralist tradition that emphasizes the economic dimension of class struggle, and primarily refers to the fundamental work Das Kapital.
But, there is a third possibility of interpretation for Marxian thought, that emerges after ‘68 and the publication of the less well-known work the Grundrisse, in particular, the “Fragment on Machines.” In this text, Marx focuses on the question of technological change, its effects on the sphere of worker subjectivity, and the reduction in necessary labor time – liberation of the time of social life from twage slavery –, as a condition of communism.
Italian workerism emphasizes the importance of the Marxian “Fragment” and, at the same time, it raises the issue of subjectivation in terms of the social recomposition of labor, against work. The struggle is, in essence, the struggle to free the time of human life from waged labor. At the same time, Guattari emphasizes the liberating character of the machinic dimension, and abandons a nostalgic-humanist posture of the suspicion of technology.
Chaosmic Spasm
D.S.: To conclude this discussion about the figure of Guattari, what would you say about the significance of his work today? In your previously mentioned book, Félix, on the chapter “Happy Depression” you introduce reflections coming from Buddhism. Do you want to add anything else about Guattari?
F.B.: I think that the most important legacy of Félix is found in his last work, Chaosmosis and in the book written in parallel to that one, in collaboration with Deleuze, What Is Philosophy? In this shared book, they speak of old age and friendship. And there is talk of chaos, of the feeling of excess, being overwhelmed. Chaos and the brain, the pain of being overcome by the velocity of signs. But in his solo book, Guattari writes the words: chaosmic spasm. I think this is the first time that these words appear in his work. The spasm, the painful acceleration of the organism, the panic and paralysis that this causes.
Reading Anti-Oedipus produced an effect of euphoria at the intellectual and political level. A euphoria that was contemporaneous with an intensification of the semiotic, media, visual world. A euphoria contemporaneous with neoliberal deregulation. That euphoria – that can be identified as a desiring current – traversed the Italian social movement, in Italy as well as in other places. Depression has become a massive, expanding phenomenon in the new century, especially for the connective generation. In the work of Deleuze and Guattari, the topic of depression seems to be ignored, almost removed. However, the implicit theme in Chaosmosis and in their final joint work is depression, although the word istelf is never pronounced. The chaosmic spasm that Guattari speaks about, the chaotic effect of acceleration in relation to the brain, represent the emergence of an intention to confront the black hole.
D.S.: What are, currently, the dominant forms of modernization of capitalist subjectivity, and how do they transversally cross the psychic, the social and the institutional realms?
F.B.: I notice two general tendencies of transformation of subjectivity, diverging in different directions but that feed off of each other in a reciprocal way. The first is the creation of global autonomy, the connection of brains in a prescriptive network, the construction of a neuro-totalitarian type system that unifies the extraction of big data and the predisposition to technical automatism. The second tendency is the dementia unleashed by the bodies separated from the brains, the geopolitical chaos, war that is fragmentary and global at the same time.
The divergence between the mathematical performance of techno-communicational financial autonomy and the psychic, political, social chaos, traces a schizophrenic form of the global mind. Political will has become impotent to govern the flows of the infosphere (media, finance). Impotence is the profound character of the psychosphere of our time, a key for interpreting the turn to the right among large parts of the white population in the West. The power (potencia) of political will and of democracy as an exercise of will is annihilated by a system of techno-linguistic automatism and by the deterritorializing power (potencia) of the global semiotic production agencies: FAGMA (Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon).
As a result, will is manifested as Ersatz, as a hysterical substitute. Fascism appears again on the European and the world scene. But it is not, as in the 1920s, the euphoric futurist fascism of young men awaiting nationalist glory. Today’s fascism is that of those who cannot imagine any future, a fascism of the old age of impotence. A large number of young Europeans vote for the right – the ultra-right march in Varsovia, a few months again, convoked many young people –, they have a senile perception, they are motivated by resentment, and they are incapable of imagining a future that would be something other than a return to the past.
In Dialectic of Enlightenment, a book written in the 1940s, Adorno and Horkheimer argue that if reason is not capable of assimilating a reflection about its regressive moment then it is destined to extinction, to be destroyed (Theodor W. Adorno y Max Horkheimer: Dialettica dell’Illuminismo, Einaudi, 1947, Preface, page 5). Adorno and Horkheimer were referring to what had happened in their time: Nazism was affirmed as the destruction of reason because reason could not understand the forces of darkness evoked by the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles and the impoverishment of the German workers. The same thing happens today: reason is identified with the financial algorithm and the majority of the people turn against reason, and want revenge against the neoliberal leftist parties that imposed the power of an antisocial reason. The fascism of Trump and Brexit is a vengeance against rationality, that is why I don’t think there can be a quick return to democracy.
D.S.: A new separation between body and mind?
F.B.: The separation between the connected global brain and the affective body is the cause of the dementia that has returned. The return to national, religious, racial identity is the effect of the fall of all universalism, because universalism has been turned into technical-financial globalism. The brain connects in a bunkerized space, inaccessible to the demented bodies. And the demented bodies devote themselves to a war of the poor against the even poorer, of the impotent against the more impotent.
D.S.: Why do you insist on notions such as “chaoides” and “heterogenesis” in this context?
F.B.: In Chaosmosis, Guattari speaks of the fog and miasmas as the panorama of the end of the last century. Today the fog and miasmas have become suffocating from a physical point of view and even more so from a psycho-social point of view. “I can’t breathe:” the collective shout of those who marched in US streets after the death of Eric Garner, the asthmatic African American man who was suffocated by a police officer a few years ago, is the shout that best expresses contemporary subjectivity.
I already cited the “chaosmic spasm” that causes a painful contraction of the planetary social organism. Acceleration is provoking a spasm. Acceleration is an intensification of info-nervous stimulation that generates well-known but poorly explained pathologies, like Attention Deficit Disorder or panic attacks. Political chaos should be interpreted as a collective epiphenomenon of the pathologies of intensification, of the chaosmic spasm. What is done in a condition of spasm? You look for a different rhythm, a more harmonious rhythm, one that better synchronizes, to put it one way, the organism to the cosmos, with the mutant environment.
The “chaoide” is a semiotic set (a sign, a graph, a technical invention, a concept, a meme) that makes it possible to create a rhythm that is tune with the accelerated rhythm of the technical and the relational. A concept acts as a chaoide when it has the capacity to reveal something that is hidden by the dominant vision. Poetry can suggest a rhythm that allows for harmonizing with the chaos.
In Chaosmosis, Guattari adds the following words: “what is thinking if not the capacity to confront the chaos?” We must remember that in the last chapter of What is Philosophy?, referring to chaos and the brain, Deleuze and Guattari propose that the only way of happily relating to the chaos is is by allying with it, not fighting it, because chaos is fueled by war. Consequently, the problem is: Can the collective brain consciously produce a new attunement with the technical evolution of the collective brain itself? Can the collective brain (the general intellect) consciously act in regard to its own evolution?
D.S.: Is the discussion about violence still necessary? If it is, how can we think about counter-violence in the current context?
F.B.: In Italy, the idea prevails that the 1970s were years of much violence. And they were in the strict political field. However, today violence is much more widespread and diffuse: we observe it in our daily lives, in the reality of personal relations, in the frequency of feminicide. If the violence of the 1970s appeared primarily as a conflict between universalist visions (class struggle, internationalism, against capitalist liberal democracy), today it manifests as identitarian fragmentation, as a logic of belonging: proliferation of nationalisms, of mafias, of religious fundamentalisms. However, I don’t think that that affirmation of a historical right of the oppressed to organize violence, which was a Leninist and anarchist principle over the last century, makes any sense today.
The current form of financial, technological, psychological power cannot be matched with physical force. There is no physical place where financial power is concentrated. Command is deterritorialized and dematerialized: it is found in the circulation of signs in the infosphere, in unescapable technical automatism that physical violence cannot even touch. Only a process of sabotage and reprogramming can stop and subvert the global financial machine. Only a process of self-organization of cognitive workers can redirect the technosocial architecture of productive activity.
D.S.: Could you explain the role that you give to motherhood in relation to the body, language, signs, and sensibility?
F.B.: Luisa Muraro, in her book The Symbolic Order of the Mother, refers to the relationship between the mother’s body and the genesis of meaning: the attribution of meaning is the effect of a fundamental trust, trust in the mother’s body, or rather in the speaking voice of a human being. The relation between signified and the signifier, that is arbitrary in the case of Saussure, is formed based on the singularity of the voice and affective trust. The signifier “water” is linked with the operational signified of the liquid that we drink to quench our thirst because the voice of my mother guarantees the functional relation between the sign and the referent. When I say “mother,” I am not referring to the biological mother, nor strictly to a human being of the feminine sex, but rather a singular voice that generates meaning, that generates confidence in making sense of the world. The world makes sense because a singular body, a singular voice, attributes meaning to the words that name the world.
What happens then, when a generation of human beings appears on the scene that has learned more words from a machine than from a human voice? What happens when a generation emerges on the world scene that does not base its understanding and capacity for meaning on affective trust, but rather on the functionality of signs that do not have affective guarantee, but only an operational one? I think that this absence of the mother’s body (that could be the uncle, the neighbor, a sibling, it doesn’t matter but it has to be a singular and affective vibration), this substitution of a singular vibration by a machine, is the foundation of what we call precarity: a psychological fragility that is manifested as the inability to build social relations of solidarity.
There is a tendency, with a Lacanian origin, in contemporary psychoanalytical thought (for example, Massimo Recalcati) that claims that the essential problem of our times is the disappearance of the father, or of the symbolic authority manifested in the law and the guarantee of social order. The effect of anti-authoritarian movements and neoliberal semiotic acceleration would be the explosion of the unconscious and the disappearance of the ordering figure of the father. There is something true in this thesis, but I do not think that this is the most interesting direction for understanding what is happening, and above all, to imagine how to act therapeutically and politically. I think that the fundamental problem is not the explosion of the ordering paternal figure (the symbolic authority), but rather the fading of the mother’s body (affectivity as a foundation of symbolization). The real problem is the crisis of the capacity for fraternity. When the relationship between brothers is based on the bond with the father, it is not fraternity but a patricidal association, community among warriors. Solidarity is not founded on paternal authority, but in the affective empathy that originates from the body of the mother.
Loveless, the movie of the Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev, is about the disappearance of Aliosha, an eight year old boy whose mother Genia does not know and cannot love. That is the disappearance of the future itself, that in Zvyagintsev’s movie is substituted by the omnipresence of the mobile screen, the smart phone.
D.S.: Finally, how do you approach the question of the political-intellectual task in the current context?
F.B.: This is the most difficult question to answer: what is the task of the intellectual, of the thinker in the current moment, which we officially enter into with Trump’s victory, the diffusion of nationalism in Europe and the defeat of the left in Latin America. I would also add, more radically, what do we do when the legacy of modern humanism sinks along with the legacy of the Enlightenment and socialism?
Every day we are faced with the emergence of infamy: the arrogance of the ignorant who take power precisely due to their ignorance and arrogance. And what about the increasing misery and despair that affects a growing number of people?
I think that we have to live in a condition of duplicity that involves the exercise of speaking two different languages: the first is the language of human resistance; the second, that of prophecy and anticipation, of the creation of concepts that will be up to the challenge of the post-human mutation that we cannot stop.
On the first level, we have to educate those listening to us to be righteous among nations in the sense that the Jews gave this expression during the Shoah. Or rather, we have to increase the minorities who resist against the inhuman and commit themselves to continue being humans, like the Italian Vittorio Arrigoni, like the American Rachel Corrie. At a second level, we have to understand the new direction that evolution is imprinting on the events of history and everyday life, and elaborate concepts that are capable of traversing the chaos, of acting as chaoides, producing a horizon of conscious transformation.
On the first level, we have to create spaces of clandestine solidarity and even places of happiness so that hopeless consciousness does not turn into depression of the psyche or aggressiveness and self-harm. Resisting, we have to know that resistance cannot resist, that the values of modern humanism cannot stop or subvert the wave of anti-human vengeance that arises from the ocean of contemporary desperation. On the second level, we have to preserve awareness of the possible despite the strength of the probable, of the inevitable. The apocalypse that accompanies the mutation can obscure the possible, but it cannot cancel it. The possibility of a social use of technology, the possibility of a human use of knowledge, still lies in the connection of brains, despite the techno-social form that subjects intelligence to accumulation.
D.S.: In his thesis about the concept of history, Walter Benjamin denounced that social democracy, attached to evolutionism, watched the arrival of fascism with surprise, and that that astonishment, a product of its faith in progress, did not allow it to successfully fight it. Are we capable of extracting some type of useful political knowledge from the fascism of the 21st century?
F.B.: I think that in recent years the same situation that Benjamin denounced has been reproduced. As in the 20th century, the left has not been capable of anticipating this new wave of darkness. The left, and liberal-democracy in general, subordinated to the absolute realism of the financial economy, have lost the pulse of the profound mutation in the social psyche. Horkheimer and Adorno already raised this issue in the preface to Dialectic of Enlightenment: if critical thought is not able to understand the darkness that accompanies the Enlightenment, it signs its own death sentence.
I do not think there will be a return to liberal-democratic normalcy. I think that a Pandora’s box has been opened. Only beyond the darkness can possibility emerge again. The problem at the present is how we will survive the darkening. And, at the same time, how can we transmit the content of possibility.
[i] On chaosmosis, Bifo indicates in Phenemology of the End that it is “the process that follows the explosion of the mortophastic topology, and the resulting emergence of a new form” (pp. 253). Chaosmosis is the title of one of Guattari’s most important books, originally published in French in 1992 and translated into English in 1995 (translated by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis, published by Indiana University Press), and published in Spanish in 1996 (Manantial: Buenos Aires).
