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<h1 class="css-19v093x">"Beyond the Breakdown: Three
Meditations on a Possible Aftermath" by Franco “Bifo”
Berardi</h1>
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<div class="css-8rl9b7">conversations.e-flux.com</div>
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<br>
<em>Image by Istubalz</em>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>1. Critters</strong></p>
<p>Number one: the philosopher who best
anticipated the ongoing viral apocalypse is
Donna Haraway.</p>
<p>In <em>Staying with the Trouble</em> she
suggests that the agent of evolution is no
longer Man, the subject of History.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Burroughs speaks of viruses as an agents of
mutation: biological, cultural, linguistic
mutation.</p>
<p>Critters do not exist as individuals. They
spread collectively, as a process of
proliferation.</p>
<p>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 <em>Will zur Macht</em>.</p>
<p>The Earth is rebelling against the world,
and the agents of planet Earth are floods,
fires, and most of all critters.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Proliferation, the spread of molecular
processes, replaces history as
macro-project.</p>
<p>Thought, art, and politics are no longer to
be seen as projects of totalization (<em>Totalizierung</em>,
in Hegel’s sense), but as processes of
proliferation without totality.</p>
<p><strong>2. Usefulness</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>All of a sudden money means nothing, or
very little.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>We are passing the threshold that leads
beyond the cycle of labor–money–consumption.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>Use value, long expelled from the field of
the economics, is back, and the useful is
now king.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a rel="nofollow
noopener"
href="https://write.as/rc8dpjv5902g3vvb">controversial</a>
<a rel="nofollow noopener"
href="https://ill-will-editions.tumblr.com/post/612868071197130752/clarification-giorgio-agamben-in-keeping-with-the">texts</a>.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>3. Pleasure</strong></p>
<p>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 <em>Ersatz</em> that
replaces death with the abstraction of
value, the artificial continuity of life in
the marketplace.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>Maybe, as Agamben predicts, we’ll enter the
totalitarian hell of an all-connected
lifestyle. But a different scenario is
possible.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Death is back at the center of the
landscape: the long denied mortality that
makes humans alive.</p>
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