The following is an interview with Franco Berardi, Bifo,
that took place by email during May and June 2001 focussing
around the themes of his new book describing the
development of the 'Cognitariat'.
MF: In your new book, 'The Factory of Unhappiness' you describe a class formation, the 'cognitariat' - a conflation of cognitive worker and proletarian, working in 'so-called jobs'. You've also previously used the idea of the 'Virtual Class'. What are the qualities of the conitariat and how might they be distinguished from this slightly higher strata depicted by Kroker and Weinstein in 'Data Trash'?
Bifo: I like to refer to the concept of virtual class, which is a class that does not actually exist. It is only the abstraction of the fractal ocean of productive micro-actions of the cognitive workers. It is a useful concept, but it does not comprehend the existence (social and bodily) of those people who perform virtual tasks. But the social existence of virtual workers is not virtual, the sensual body of the virtual worker is not virtual. So I prefer to speak about cognitive proletariat (cognitariat) in order to emphasize the material (I mean physical, psychological, neurological) disease of the workers involved in the net-economy.
MF: The political / economic theorisation of post-fordism which has much of its roots in Italian activism and thought of the sixties, seventies and onwards is now an established term in describing post-industrial, work conditions. You present a variant of this, and one which suggests that the full political dynamics of this change have yet to be appreciated - how can we describe the transition from 'The Social Factory' to 'The Factory of Unhappiness'?
Bifo: Semiokapital puts neuro-psychic energies to work, and submits them to machinic speed. It compels our cognition, our emotional hardware to follow the rhythm of the net-productivity. Cyberspace overloads cybertime, because cyberspace is an unbounded sphere, whose speed can accelerate without limits. But cybertime (the time of attention, of memory, of imagination) cannot be speeded up beyond a limit. Otherwise it cracks... And it is actually cracking, collapsing under the stress of hyperproductivity. An epidemic of panic is spreading thoroughout the circuits of the social brain. An epidemic of depression is following the outbreak of panic. The current crisis of the new economy has to be seen as consequence of this nervous breakdown. Once upon a time Marx spoke about overproduction, meaning the excess of available goods that could not be absorbed by the social market. Nowadays it is the social brain that is assaulted by an overwhelming supply of attention-demanding goods. This is why the social factory has become the factory of unhappiness: the assembly line of netproduction is directly exploiting the emotional energy of the virtual class. We are now beginning to become aware of it, so we are able to recognize ourselves as cognitarians. Flesh, body, desire, in permanent electrocution.
Snafu: This consideration opens up, in your book, an interesting reflection about the mutated relationship between free and productive time. In the Fordist factory, working time is repetitive and alienating. Workers start to live elsewhere, as soon as they leave the workplace. The factory conflicts with the "natural desires" of the worker. On the contrary, in the post-fordist model, productivity absorbs the social and psychological capacities of the worker. In this way, free time progressively loses its interest, in favour of what you call the contemporary "reaffectivization" of labour. On the other side, you depict the net-economy as a giant "brainivore". My question regards the apparent contradiction embedded in this double movement. How is it possible that people are at the same time so attached to their job and so exhausted by it? What are the psychological reasons that push people to build their own cages?
Bifo: Every person involved in the Net-economy knows this paradox very well. It is the paradox of social identity. We feel motivated only by our social role, because the sensuous life is more and more anorexic, more and more virtualized. Simultaneously we experience a desensualization of our life because we are so obsessed by social performance. It is the effect of the economic backmail, the increasing cost of daily life: we need to work more and more in order to gain enough money to pay the expensive way of life we are accustomed to. But it is also the effect of a growing investment of desire in the field of social performance, of competition, of productivity.
MF: In what ways are people developing forms of resistance, organisation, solidarity that shift the algorithms of control in their favour in 'the movement of the cognitariat'. Or in other words, what forms - and given the difference between the 'felicita' of the original title and 'happiness' in English - might the production of happiness take?
Bifo: Resistance is residual. Some people still create social networks, like the centri sociali in Italy: places where production and exchange and daily life are protected from the final commodification. But this is a residual of the past age of proletarian community. This legacy has to be saved, but I do not see the future coming out from such resistance. I see it in the process of recombination. I see this movement, spreading all over the world, since the days of the Seattle riots as the global movement of self organisation of cognitive work. You know, I do not see this movement as resistance against globalisation. Not at all. This is a global movement against corporate capitalism. Problem is: where is it receiving its potency from? I don't think that this is the movement of the marginalized, of the unemployed, of the farmers, of the industrial workers fighting against the delocalisation of the factories. Oh yes, those people are part of the movement in the streets. But the core of this movement resides in the process of conscious self-organization of cognitive work all over the world, thanks to the Net. This movement represents, in my view, the beginning of a conscious reshaping of the techno-social interfaces of the net, operated by the cognitarians. Scientists, researchers, programmers, mediaworkers, every segment of the networked general intellect are going to repolarize and reshape its episteme, its creative action.
MF: You were involved in manifestations against the OECD meeting in Bologna. What are the tactics developing in that movement and elsewhere that you see as being most useful? What are those that perhaps connect the cognitariat to other social and political currents?
Bifo: I do not think that the street is the place where this movement will grow. In the streets it was symbolically born. The street riot has been the symbolic detonator, but the net-riot is the real process of trasformation. When eighty thousand people were acting in the streets of Seattle, three, four million people (those who were in virtual contact with the demonstration thanks to the Internet) were taking part in a big virtual meeting all around the globe, chatting, discussing, reading. All those people are the cognitariat. So I think that the global movement against corporate capitalism is absolutely right when it goes to the streets, organizing blockades like in Seattle, Prague, Bologna, and Quebec City, and next July in Genova. But this is only symbolic action that fuels the real movement of sabotage and of reshaping, which has to be organized in every lab, in every place where cognitarians are producing, and creating the technical interfaces of the social fabric. The industrial working class needed a political party in order to organize autonomy, struggle, self-organization, social change. The networked class of the cognitariat finds the tool of self-organization in the same network that is also the tool of exploitation. As far as the forms of the struggle in the streets are concerned, I think we should be careful. This movement does not need violence, it needs a theatricalisation of the hidden conflict that is growing in the process of mental work. Mental work, once organized and consciously managed can be very disruptive for capitalist rule. And can be very useful in reshaping the relationship between technology and social use of it.
Snafu: I'd like to know what the 'keywords of resistance within every lab' that you mentioned are, and to ask what the technical interfaces of the social fabric are? In particular i'd like to understand if, when you mention the techno-social interfaces, you refer to non-proprietary systems such as Linux, or if you have a broader view. But also, if the shared production of freeware and open source softwares represents a shift away from capitalism or if we are only facing the latest, most suitable form of capitalism given in this historical phase. As far as i know, military agencies and corporations use and develop free software as well as hacker circuits...
Bifo: Well, I do not see things in this antagonistic (dialectical) way. I mean, I do not think that freeware and open source are outside the sphere of capitalism. Similarly I do not think that the worker's collective strike and self organisation in the old Fordist factory was ouside the sphere of capitalism. Nothing is outside the sphere of capitalism, because capitalism is not a dialectic totality suited to be overwhelmed (Auf-heben) by a new totality (like communism, or something like that). Capital is a cognitive framework of social activity, a semiotic frame embedded in the social psyche and in the human Techne. Struglle against capitalism , refusal of work, temporary autonomous zones, open source and freeware... all this is not the new totality, it is the dynamic recombination allowing people to find their space of autonomy, and push Capitalism towards progressive innovation.
Snafu: Another question is about the network. It can be used as a tool of self-organization, but it is also a powerful means of control. Do you think that there are new forms of life emerging within the network? I mean, can the network guarantee the rise of a new form of political consciousness comparable to the one emerging with mass parties? At the moment, global networks such as nettime, syndicate, rhizome and indymedia remain platforms for exchanging information more than real infrastructures providing support, coordination and a real level of cooperation (with few exceptions, such as the Toywar). Do you see the development of the network of the cognitarians, from a means of info-distribution to a stable infrastructure? How the different communities - such as hackers, activists, net.artists, programmers, web designers - will define a common agenda? At the moment each of them seem to me pretty stuck on their own issues, even when they are part of the same mailing list...
Bifo: The net is a newborn sphere, and it not only going effect conscious and political behaviour, but it is also going to re-frame anthropology and cognition. The Internet is not a means (an instrument) of poltical organisation, and it is not a means (an instrument) of information. It is a public sphere, an anthropological and cognitional environment … The Internet is simultaneously the place of social production, and the place of selforganisation.
MF: After the May Day demonstrations in central London, at the central end of which the police, several thousand of them, penned in a similar number of demonstrators for hours, it strikes me that It's almost as if the police are determined themselves to teach the people that staying static is a mistake. Certainly though, new ways of moving collectively in space are being invented and many of those are being tried out in the street. But perhaps amongst other currents there is also a reluctance or a nervousness about doing something concrete, about using power in a way that might risk repeating the impositions we have all experienced. On the one hand it could be said that this meakness is a strength, (if not just a public expression of a vague moral unease) but on the other it could be understood precisely as a result of this awareness that people have that their actions are always implicated in a multi-layered network of medial reiteration. Centralised networks that stratify and imprison people in the case of CCTV, but that also networks that are at once diffuse but that also contain, as you say, 'exploitation'. Given this, what are the ways in which you claim that this 'net-riot' creates transformation or exerts its political strength?
Bifo: I see two different (and interrelated) stages of the global revolt: one is the symbolic action that takes place in the street, the other is the process of selforganisation of cognitive work, of scientists, researchers, giving public access to the results of the cognitive production, unlocking it from the hold of corporations. It may sound paradoxical. The physical action of facing police in the streets, of howling below the windows of IMF, WTO and G8, this is just the symbolic trigger of the real change, which takes place in the mental environment, in the ethereal cyberspace.
