Futurability. Franco “Bifo” Berardi

following continuous tension, and a leaning towards depression.

      In the book Impuissances, Yves Citton takes into account a wide range of French literary works that deal with sexual impotence. In the chapter ‘Le Fiasco’, Citton identifies the ‘cause’ of the défaillance (incapacity) as the excess of stimulation that the male subject is unable to master. ‘It is not a lack of attraction, but rather the excess of beauty by which the woman is perceived as untouchable.’⁶

      Rhythm acceleration, stimulus intensification, hyperstimulation of the nervous system: this is a likely pathway to sexual failure. And in the context of patriarchal culture, which is the deep background of Western civilization – sex and social power are narrowly intertwined.

      Grounding his identity on the arousing as a proof of existence, the male is condemned to reduce his self-assurance on something quite episodic … The self-reputation of the person who grounds identity on virility is obliged to assume a posture of Omnipotence.⁷

      In many regards, impotence may be viewed as a problem of rhythm: the relation between embodied time and automated time intensifies. Because of hyper-stimulation, the investment in desire is increased, up to the point of exhaustion. Then the sensuous organism withdraws the investment in desire, and surfs the icy waves of the lake of frigidity.

      The aestheticization of contemporary culture may be read as a symptom and a metaphor of frigidity: endless flight from one object of desire to another, overload of aesthetic stimulation, invasion of the public space by aesthetically arousing advertising.

      In Carnage, the claustrophobic Roman Polanski movie, Kate Winslet’s character, Nancy Cowan, explains that her husband, a lawyer continuously answering calls on his smart phone, thinks every stimulation coming from a distant agent is more exciting and important than any stimulation coming from the living beings who dwell in his vicinity.

      The present shifts away, impossible to touch or to savour, as the flows of neuro-stimulation push forward, towards a never-coming future. The emotion that comes from the near body is blurred by frantic impulses coming from afar, continuously reclaiming our attention.

      Anaesthesia is the effect of sensory saturation and the path to an-empathy: the ethical catastrophe of our time is based on the inability to perceive the other as a sensible extension of one’s own sensibility.

      The cognitive competence that we call sensibility has developed as the ability to decipher signs that do not belong to the verbal sphere. This competence is under threat as cognitive automatisms inscribed in the digital exchange (and reinforced by the economic code) tend to reduce the conscious elaboration to a succession of binary choices.

      In psychopathological parlance, autistic persons do not have a ‘theory of the other’s mind’.⁸ When acting inside a network of automatic exchanges, it is not necessary to assume the existence of the other’s mind or to interpret signs as if they were from another conscious and sensitive organism. Within this context, signs need only be interpreted according to a finite computation of a discrete set of information. The other is only a simulated construction of the interaction between our mind and the machine. Compatibility replaces sensibility.

      The connective biosphere is the smooth space where information, the now-universal substance of valorization, can easily flow. But in order to flow without obstruction, it is necessary to remove any impurity that may slow its path: namely, sensibility.

      The connective paradigm (and the connective mode) infiltrates the deep fabric of the human biosphere, permeates the organism’s barriers, and something happens at the level of the process of individuation. The mutation invades the individual’s self-perception, and integrates it in the connective framework of the socio-technical continuum of the net.

      The individual organism is cleared of any mark of singularity and transformed into a smooth surface, free of roughness, of irregularity, and therefore compliant with the linguistic machine, with the hub of techno-linguistic automatisms.

      Connective individuation fractures cells of a process of modular recombination. The bio-informatic superorganism reads the event of language as a disturbance, and discards it as noise.

       2

       Humanism, Misogyny and Late Modern Thought

      Humanism as Potency and Freedom

      An exhaustive definition of humanism is beyond my scope here, but by the word ‘humanism’ we generally refer to a philosophical and artistic movement that appeared first in Italy in the fifteenth century, then spread throughout Europe. However, in this context, I refer particularly to a concept that widely defines the identity of European culture in modern times.

      Here, I propose to consider humanism as the assertion of freedom and the potency of man.

      According to Leon Battista Alberti, man has been created for work (opera), and usefulness is humanity’s determination. The humanist emphasis on activity and enterprise (intrapresa) implies two conceptual dimensions: freedom and potency of action.

      The notion of freedom is not, here, intended in the juridical sense: it is not freedom from the law or from political constriction. It is instead ontological freedom, independence from predetermined forms, and, therefore, the possibility to create forms that do not pre-exist in the mind of God.

      Humanism emancipates human history from the presence of a God no longer needed to explain human action. The form of things does not depend on the will of God, but on the action of man. Ernst Bloch, in his book on the philosophy of the Renaissance, speaks of the birth of the ‘technical utopia’.