[D66] Beyond the Breakdown: Three Meditations on a Possible Aftermath

[Antid Oto]

  "Beyond the Breakdown: Three Meditations on a Possible Aftermath" by
  Franco “Bifo” Berardi

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All of a sudden, what we have been thinking for the last fifty years has 
to be rethought from scratch. Thank god (is god a virus?) that we have 
an abundance of extra time now because the old business is out of business.

I’m going to say something about three distinct subjects. One: the end 
of human history, which is clearly unfolding before our eyes. Two: the 
ongoing emancipation from capitalism, and/or the imminent danger of 
techno-totalitarianism. Three: the return of death (at last) to the 
scene of philosophical discourse, after its long modern denial, and the 
revitalization of the body as dissipation.

*1. Critters*

Number one: the philosopher who best anticipated the ongoing viral 
apocalypse is Donna Haraway.

In /Staying with the Trouble/ she suggests that the agent of evolution 
is no longer Man, the subject of History.

The human is losing its centrality in this chaotic process, and we 
should not despair over this, like the nostalgics of modern humanism do. 
At the same time, we should not seek comfort in the delusions of a 
techno-fix, like the contemporary transhumanist techno-maniacs do.

Human history is over, and the new agents of history are the “critters,” 
in Haraway’s parlance. The word “critter” refers to small creatures, 
small playful creatures who do strange things, like provoking mutation. 
Well: the virus.

Burroughs speaks of viruses as an agents of mutation: biological, 
cultural, linguistic mutation.

Critters do not exist as individuals. They spread collectively, as a 
process of proliferation.

The year 2020 should be seen as the year when human history 
dissolved—not because human beings disappear from planet Earth, but 
because planet Earth, tired of their arrogance, launched a 
micro-campaign to destroy their /Will zur Macht/.

The Earth is rebelling against the world, and the agents of planet Earth 
are floods, fires, and most of all critters.

Therefore, the agent of evolution is no longer the conscious, 
aggressive, and strong-willed human being—but molecular matter, 
micro-flows of uncontrollable critters who invade the space of 
production, and the space of discourse, replacing History with 
Her-story, the time in which teleological Reason is replaced by 
Sensibility and sensuous chaotic becoming.

Humanism was based on the ontological freedom that the Italian 
philosophers of the early Renaissance identified with the absence of 
theological determinism. Theological determinism is over, and the virus 
has taken the place of a teleological god.

The end of subjectivity as the engine of the historical process implies 
the end of what we have called capital-H “History,” and implies the 
beginning of a process in which conscious teleology is replaced by 
multiple strategies of proliferation.

Proliferation, the spread of molecular processes, replaces history as 
macro-project.

Thought, art, and politics are no longer to be seen as projects of 
totalization (/Totalizierung/, in Hegel’s sense), but as processes of 
proliferation without totality.

*2. Usefulness*

After forty years of neoliberal acceleration, the race of financial 
capitalism has suddenly ground to a halt. One, two, three months of 
global lockdown, a long interruption of the production process and of 
the global circulation of people and goods, a long period of seclusion, 
the tragedy of the pandemic … all of this is going to break capitalist 
dynamics in a way that may be irremediable, irreversible. The powers 
that manage global capital at the political and financial level are 
desperately trying to save the economy, injecting enormous amounts of 
money into it. Billions, billions of billions … figures, numbers that 
now tend to mean: zero.

All of a sudden money means nothing, or very little.

Why are you giving money to a dead body? Can you revive the body of the 
global economy by injecting money into it? You can’t. The point is that 
both the supply side and the demand side are immune to money stimulus, 
because the slump is not happening for financial reasons (like in 2008), 
but because of the collapse of bodies, and bodies have nothing to do 
with financial stimulus.

We are passing the threshold that leads beyond the cycle of 
labor–money–consumption.

When, one day, the body comes out from the confinement of quarantine, 
the problem will not be rebalancing the relation between time, work, and 
money, rebalancing debt and repayment. The European Union has been 
fractured and weakened by its obsession with debt and balance, but 
people are dying, hospitals are running out of ventilators, and doctors 
are overwhelmed by fatigue, anxiety, and fear of infection. Right now 
this cannot be changed by money, because money is not the problem. The 
problem is: What are our concrete needs? What is useful for human life, 
for collectivity, for therapy?

Use value, long expelled from the field of the economics, is back, and 
the useful is now king.

Money cannot buy the vaccine that we don’t have, cannot buy the 
protective masks that have not been produced, cannot buy the intensive 
care departments that have been destroyed by the neoliberal reform of 
Europe’s healthcare system. No, money cannot buy what does not exist. 
Only knowledge, only intelligent labor can buy what does not exist.

So money is impotent now. Only social solidarity and scientific 
intelligence are alive, and they can become politically powerful. This 
is why I think that at the end of the global quarantine, we won’t go 
back to normal. Normal will never come back. What will happen in the 
aftermath has not yet been determined, and is not predictable.

We face two political alternatives: either a techno-totalitarian system 
that will relaunch the capitalist economy by means of violence, or the 
liberation of human activity from capitalist abstraction and the 
creation of a molecular society based on usefulness.

The Chinese government is already experimenting on a massive scale with 
techno-totalitarian capitalism. This techno-totalitarian solution, 
anticipated by the provisional abolition of individual freedom, may 
become the dominant system of the time to come, as Agamben has rightly 
pointed out in his recent controversial 
<https://write.as/rc8dpjv5902g3vvb> texts 
<https://ill-will-editions.tumblr.com/post/612868071197130752/clarification-giorgio-agamben-in-keeping-with-the>.

But what Agamben says is only an obvious description of the present 
emergency, and of the probable future. I want to go beyond the probable, 
because the possible is more interesting to me. And the possible is 
contained in the breakdown of abstraction, and in the dramatic return of 
the concrete body as a bearer of concrete needs.

The useful is back in the social field. Usefulness, long forgotten and 
denied by the capitalist process of abstract valorization, is now the 
king of the scene.

The sky is clear in these days of quarantine, the atmosphere is free 
from polluting particulates, as factories are closed and cars cannot 
circulate. Will we go back to the polluting extractive economy? Will we 
go back to the normal frenzy of destruction for accumulation, and of 
useless acceleration for the sake of exchange value? No, we must go 
forward, toward the creation of a society based on the production of the 
useful.

What do we need now? Now, in the immediate now, we need a vaccine 
against the malady, we need protective masks, and we need intensive care 
equipment. And in the long run we need food, we need affection and 
pleasure. And a new culture of tenderness, solidarity, and frugality.

What is left of capitalist power will try to impose a 
techno-totalitarian system of control on society—this is obvious. But 
the alternative is here now: a society free from the compulsions of 
accumulation and economic growth.

*3. Pleasure*

The third point I would like to reflect on is the return of mortality as 
the defining feature of human life. Capitalism has been a fantastic 
attempt to overcome death. Accumulation is the /Ersatz/ that replaces 
death with the abstraction of value, the artificial continuity of life 
in the marketplace.

The shift from industrial production to info-work, the shift from 
conjunction to connection in the sphere of communication, is the end 
point of the race toward abstraction, which is the main thread of 
capitalist evolution.

In a pandemic, conjunction is forbidden—stay home, don’t visit friends, 
keep your distance, don’t touch anybody. An enormous expansion of time 
spent online is underway, unavoidably, and all social relations—work, 
production, education—have been displaced into this sphere that 
prohibits conjunction. Offline social exchange is no longer possible. 
What will happen after weeks and months of this?

Maybe, as Agamben predicts, we’ll enter the totalitarian hell of an 
all-connected lifestyle. But a different scenario is possible.

What if the overload of connection breaks the spell? When the pandemic 
finally dissipates (assuming that it will), it’s possible that a new 
psychological identification will have imposed itself: online equals 
sickness. We also have to imagine and create a movement of caressing 
that will compel young people to turn off their connective screens as 
reminders of a lonely and fearful time. This does not mean that we 
should go back to the physical fatigue of industrial capitalism; it 
rather means that we should take advantage of the richness of time that 
automation emancipates from physical labor, and dedicate our time to 
physical and mental pleasure.

The massive spread of death we are witnessing in this pandemic may 
reactivate our sense of time as enjoyment, rather than as the 
postponement of joy.

At the end of the pandemic, at the end of the long period of isolation, 
people may simply continue sinking into the eternal nothingness of 
virtual connection, of distancing and techno-totalitarian integration. 
This is possible, even probable. But we should not be confined by the 
probable. We should discover the possibility hidden in the present.

It may be that after months of constant online connectivity, people will 
come out of their houses and apartments looking for conjunction. A 
movement of solidarity and tenderness might arise, leading people toward 
an emancipation from connective dictatorship.

Death is back at the center of the landscape: the long denied mortality 
that makes humans alive.


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