Around the time of all the stuff kicking off in 2011, the student protests, the English Riots and the Occupy movement, a friend, noticing that I was projecting slightly more nervous energy than usual, suggested an article by a writer I’d never heard of.
I’d only started reading in my mid 20s. After the financial crash of 2008 I’d learnt to meticulously study the words on a page, because I wanted to know, in my own words, “what the hell was going on”. Because I worked in a gallery, with no Wifi, little reception, little interruption, and with more panic about the state of the world than the state of my professional and personal life, I had a good chance to do what I intended.
I still found most philosophy texts impenetrable, and just hoped the ‘message’ inside would come to me at a later date. I was still reading cultural theory with a limited understanding of the English language, and when my friend, over Facebook, suggested I read “Cognitarian Subjectivation” by Franco “Bifo” Berardi I read it for the most part with the desire to show him that I understood it and was as intelligent as he was.
This is how it goes:
Recent years have witnessed a new techno-social framework of contemporary subjectivation. And I would like to ask whether a process of autonomous, collective self-definition is possible in the present age. The concept of “general intellect” associated with Italian post-operaist thought in the 1990s (Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarato, Christian Marazzi) emphasizes the interaction between labor and language: social labor is the endless recombination of myriad fragments producing, elaborating, distributing, and decoding signs and informational units of all kinds. Every semiotic segment produced by the information worker must meet and match innumerable other semiotic segments in order to form the combinatory frame of the info-commodity, semiocapital.
Semiocapital puts neuro-psychic energies to work, submitting them to mechanistic speed, compelling cognitive activity to follow the rhythm of networked productivity. As a result, the emotional sphere linked with cognition is stressed to its limit. Cyberspace overloads cybertime, because cyberspace is an unbounded sphere whose speed can accelerate without limits, while cybertime (the organic time of attention, memory, imagination) cannot be sped up beyond a certain point—or it cracks. And it actually is cracking, collapsing under the stress of hyper-productivity. An epidemic of panic and depression is now spreading throughout the circuits of the social brain. The current crisis in the global economy has much to do with this nervous breakdown. Marx spoke of overproduction, meaning the excess of available goods that could not be absorbed by the social market. But today it is the social brain that is assaulted by an overwhelming supply of attention-demanding goods. The social factory has become the factory of unhappiness: the assembly line of networked production is directly exploiting the emotional energy of the cognitive class.
You didn’t need to be present at Occupy London, see the fires burning in Tottenham, or be kettled by police with other Millennials to be present in 2011. We were all there in 2011: we were all online, perhaps for the first time.
The febrile quality of social media interaction in the early days of the previous decade was an initial, less monitored and managed, manifestation of what it is now.
We can read the previous passage by Berardi in the way we may look at the results of our own medical examination, or x-ray. We may not know, or understand every specific word for everything we can see, but we know what we are shown, because we know that what we are presented with is ourselves.
Reading it in 2024, we may find ourselves saying that anxiety, depression, paranoia, ADHD and burnout are “just part of life now”,
When our “neuro-physical energies are tethered to a mechanistic speed, our relationship to the capital machine is deeply more involved in our every breath more than the mill workers, and ship builders of the 19th century could ever imagine.
Reading this in 2024 makes me nostalgic for 2011, which even with everything going off, seemed like a less panicky time, a time when breathing was easier.
I could go on, but I think it’s unnecessary. I rarely like the sound of my own words upon the those written by others. I just wanted to highlight this essay for what I believe is it significance more than ever.
John B Ledger 