But the diagnosis is even more radical. The point isn’t to revive the future in a new vanguard. The future was itself a highly suspect temporal form—for Berardi, the “imaginary effect” of the capitalist mode of production, with its expansive pursuit of surplus value. Things started to turn in 1977, the beginning of the progressive dissolution of “the century that trusted in the future.” It is here identified in British punk, but also in the Italian “Movement of ’77” that Berardi is so closely associated with.
Franco Berardi, or “Bifo,” is principally known to Anglo-American readers for his association with operaismo (“workerism”) and the movement of autonomia (“autonomy”). This current in Italian thought and extra-parliamentary politics came to prominence and considerable influence in the 1970s for its transformative approach to communist politics—placing workers’ needs, desires, and organizational autonomies at the center of political praxis—and for the wave of repression unleashed against it (Wright 2002). Since then, and under the rubric of “postautonomism” and “postworkerism”—what Bifo prefers to call “compositionism”—this current has come to have considerable influence in activist circles, postmedia cultures, and the university. Antonio Negri is, of course, the principal figure here, but it would be a great mistake to take his work as an emblem for the historical forms and contemporary parameters of this mode of thought and politics as a whole.
A comrade of Negri’s in the key workerist organization, Potere Operaio, Bifo’s politics have continued to display the signs of the workerist current. This is not least in his insistence on engaging and researching the most contemporary technical and antagonistic composition of any class formation, never falling back on a preconstituted, identitarian understanding of political subjectivity. The deployment of the autonomist talisman of Marx’s concept of the “general intellect” is perhaps the most enduring sign of this mode of intellectual commitment in his work. But Bifo’s relation to the critical current of operaismo is something of a zigzag, a transversal connection that is as much open to the outside of autonomist politics as it is an elaboration of it.
This is no more apparent than in the Bologna collective A/Traverso (“In-between”) that Bifo helped establish in the mid-1970s, and in the associated free radio station, Radio Alice. In these technocultural experiments in publishing, research, organization, and broadcasting, autonomist theses were enmeshed with pop-cultural styles, media capacities, the urban rebellions of proletarian youth, sexual politics, modernist poetics, and the conceptual innovations of poststructuralist thought, most especially those of Deleuze and Guattari. Shutdown by armed police for its contribution to the Bologna uprisings in the Spring of 1977, Radio Alice has taken on something of a mythic aspect, one confirmed in the highly evocative recent film about Radio Alice, Lavorare con lentezza, in which Bifo takes a cameo turn as a Marxist lawyer.
Bifo’s transversal politics, writing, and media practice have since developed through numerous organizational and media forms, as radio waves have been joined by digital technologies in the field of political composition—the movement of community television, Telestreet, and the Web forum, Rekombinant, are notable instances. But returning to the themes of this book, how are Bifo’s arguments different or transversal to the positions that have come to be associated with postworkerism?
Bifo’s diagnosis is considerably darker than that of Hardt and Negri, as we can see with regard to the theme of “immaterial labor.” In the rise to prominence of the intellectual, semiotic, and affective content of work and its product, it’s now well known that Hardt and Negri detect a tendency toward workers’ autonomy, where capital becomes a parasitic agent of capture external to the self-organization of labor. Bifo’s conclusions are rather different. The agential force in contemporary configurations of work is not labor, but most decidedly capital. In a dozen pages of the Grundrisse known by operaismo as the “Fragment on Machines,” Marx (1973, 692) observed that the capitalist production mechanism is a “vast automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs.” Here, as he continues,
Labor appears … merely as a conscious organ, scattered among the individual living workers at numerous points of the mechanical system … whose unity exists not in the living workers, but rather in the living (active) machinery, which confronts his individual, insignificant doings as a mighty organism. (Marx 1973, 693)
In After the Future, Bifo iterates Marx’s thesis in the radically new times of digital capitalism. And he finds that the “automaton” has multiplied its powers to disaggregate and orchestrate the parts or organs of labor; the whole psychosphere of the human being becomes subject to the movement of capital, now operating at digital speeds. With the networking powers of information technology, the capacities of capitalist work processes to orchestrate labor have not only been extended spatially, across the globe, but have intensified temporally also. Today’s firms don’t purchase workers as a whole, but a fragment of their activity, sensibility, attention, communicative capacity. One of Bifo’s most compelling contributions to the theory of “semiocapitalism”—capitalism that makes signs, affects, attitudes, and ideas directly productive—is the cellularization of labor. As production becomes semiotic, cognitive workers are precariously employed—on occasional, contractual, temporary bases—and their work involves the elaboration of segments or “semiotic artifacts” that are highly abstract entities combined and recombined through an exploitative digital network only at the precise time they are required. The social field, as he argues here, is “an ocean of valorizing cells convened in a cellular way and recombined by the subjectivity of capital.” These infolaborers are paid only for the moments when their time is made cellular, yet their entire days are subjected to this kind of production, “pulsating and available, like a brain-sprawl in waiting,” Blackberries and mobile phones ever ready.
The psychic and somatic form of the human cannot take this, and as our cognitive, communicative, and emotional capacities become subject to cellular fragmentation and recombination under the new machine-speed of information, we get sick. Depression, panic, unhappiness, anxiety, fear, terror—these are the affective conditions of contemporary labor, the “psycho-bombs” of cognitive capitalism, each, naturally, with its own psychopharmacology. Nonetheless, we actively submit ourselves to this regime; this is the perversity of contemporary culture. Of course, the vast majority has no choice—these are the structural conditions of work. But the progressive commercialization of culture, deadening of metropolitan life, loss of solidarity, and insidious dispersal of mechanisms of competition are such that we have come to fixate our desires on work. Even as it pushes human affective and cognitive capacities to breaking point, the entrepreneurial form is the only adequate expression of our current communicative and affective qualities, the one most able to confirm our increasingly competitive and narcissistic drives.
Such existential “precarity” is not to be solved by a return to the Fordist model of labor time and contract security. This was not only a temporary and now passed formation in the long history of otherwise precarious labor (and one that was even then peculiar to a particular racialized and gendered fragment of the working population). It was also the specific object of workers’ resistance in the 1970s, resistance that Bifo and autonomia valorized as the “refusal of work.” Neither are the militant strategies of the past any longer viable, and Bifo has no interest in reviving the corpse of orthodox communism. His opinion of this tradition is abundantly clear in The Soul at Work:
The only relation between the State Communism imposed by the Leninist parties in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, and the autonomous communism of the workers, is the violence systematically exerted by the first over the second, in order to subdue, discipline, and destroy it. (Berardi 2009, 85)
There is, then, no return to Lenin or Mao. Alongside Hardt and Negri, perhaps the most prominent and influential efforts to reestablish a communism adequate to the current conjuncture are to be found in the work of Alain Badiou. In his later work, Badiou has turned away from vanguard models of the party. Yet this is because we have entered a new “sequence,” beyond that which was characterized by the Leninist party form and Mao’s Cultural Revolution (Badiou 2008). Bifo’s difference is that, whether