Soul on Strike
The soul is the clinamen of the body.1 It is how it falls, and what makes it fall in with other bodies. The soul is its gravity. This tendency for certain bodies to fall in with others is what constitutes a world. The materialist tradition represented by Epicurus and Lucretius proposed a worldless time in which bodies rain down through the plumbless void, straight down and side-by-side, until a sudden, unpredictable deviation or swerve—clinamen—leans bodies toward one another, so that they come together in a lasting way. The soul does not lie beneath the skin. It is the angle of this swerve and what then holds these bodies together. It spaces bodies, rather than hiding within them; it is among them, their consistency, the affinity they have for one another. It is what they share in common: neither a form, nor some thing, but a rhythm, a certain way of vibrating, a resonance. Frequency, tuning or tone.
To speak of a soul at work is to move the center of gravity in contemporary debates about cognitive capitalism. The soul is not simply the capacity for abstraction, for the subsumption of the particular. It is an aesthetic organ as well, the exposure of thought to the contractions and dilations of space, to the quickening and lapsing of time. To say the soul is put to work is to affirm that the social brain or general intellect (to use two of Marx’s phrases that have some currency in these debates) is not the primary source of value in the production process. Rather the soul as a web of attachments and tastes, attractions and inclinations. The soul is not simply the seat of intellectual operations, but the affective and libidinal forces that weave together a world: attentiveness, the ability to address, care for and appeal to others. The contemporary subject of cognitive capitalism—Bifo speaks of the cognitariat, but perhaps there are other names—is not simply a producer of knowledge and a manager of symbols. Capitalism is the mobilization of a pathos and the organization of a mood; its subject, a field of desire, a point of inflexion for an impersonal affect that circulates like a rumor. The cognitariat carries a virus.
Bifo’s book The Soul at Work calls itself an experiment in “psychopathology,” and it describes how something in the collective soul has seized up. The world has become heavy, thick, opaque, intransigent. A little, dark light shines through, though. Something opens up with this extinction of the possible. We no longer feel compelled to act, that is, to be effective. Our passivity almost seems like a release, a refusal, a de-activation of a system of possibles that are not ours. The possible is seen for what it is: an imposition, smothering. With the eclipse of the possible, at the point zero of depressive lapse, we are at times seized by our own potentiality: a potency that, no longer invested in vectors of realization, washes back over us.
Depression occurs, Franco “Bifo” Berardi argues, when the speed and complexity of the flows of information overwhelm the capacities of the “social brain” to manage these flows, inducing a panic that concludes, shortly thereafter, with a depressive plunge. Depression is so widespread today, Bifoargues, because the contemporary organization of production of surplus-value is founded on the phenomenon—the accumulation—of speed. In well-known pages from the Grundrisse, Marx spoke of a tendency, a limit point in the process of the valorization of capital: the impossible possibility that capital might circulate “without circulation time,” at an infinite velocity, such that the passage from one moment in the circulation of capital to the next would take place at the “speed of thought.” Such a capital would return to itself even before taking leave of itself, passing through all of its phases in a process encountering no obstacles, in an ideal time without time—in the blinding flash of an instant without duration, a cycle contracting into a point. No less an authority than Bill Gates restages this fantasy—a limit point of capital, toward which it strains, its vanishing point—in his Business @ the Speed of Thought, cited by Bifo as a contemporary formalization of this threshold, summoning the possibility of the circulation of information that would, Gates fantasizes, occur as “quickly and naturally as thought in a human being.”
There is speed and there is speed. It is not simply the phenomenon of speed as such that plays the pathogenic role here. The social factory is just as much governed by the destabilizing experience of changes in rhythms, differences in speeds, whiplash-like reorientations imposed on a workforce that is flexible, precarious and permanently on-call—and equipped with the latest iPhone. This organization of work, in which just-in-time production is overseen by a permanently temporary labor force, is mirrored in the form of governance characteristic of democratic imperialism, sustained as it is by appeals to urgency, permanent mobilization, suspensions of norms: governance by crisis, rule by exception. It is impossible to separate the spheres of the economy and the political these days. In each case, a managed disorder, the administration of chaos. The social pacts and productive truces of the old welfare states are gone. Instability is now the order of the day. Disorder, a technique of government. Depression starts to look less like a drying up of desire than a stubborn, if painful, libidinal slowdown or sabotage, a demobilization. The soul on strike.
The Soul at Work wants to answer this question: How did we get from the particular forms of workers’ struggle in the 1960s, characterized by widespread “estrangement” of workers from the capitalist organization of production, to the situation today, in which work has become the central locus of psychic and emotional investment, even as this new libidinal economy induces an entire range of collective pathologies, from disorders of attention to new forms of dyslexia, from sudden panics to mass depression? How, in other words, have we passed from the social antagonisms of the 1960s and 1970s, when worker power was paradoxically defined by a refusal of work, its autonomy from the capitalist valorization process, and its own forms of organization—its defection from factory discipline—to the experience of the last two decades, where work has become the core of our identity, no longer economically necessary, yet vital to the constitution of the self? In short, from fleeing work to identifying with it?
Something happened in 1977. Bifo hangs his story on this mutation. It’s the year when the refusal of work reaches a fever pitch in the Italian autonomia movement, the year that the logic of antagonism and worker needs—what Mario Tronti called the “antagonistic will” of the proletariat—gives way to a logic of desire, in which social productivity can no longer be accounted for in strictly economic categories, and in which the insurrectionary vectors no longer map onto the old imaginary of social war. The centrality of the category of worker needs in the struggles of the 1960s took primarily two forms. In the sphere of consumption, there was the form of direct democracy known as “political” pricing, in which neighborhoods and entire sections of cities unilaterally reduced the costs of goods and services such as housing, transportation and electricity, on the basis of a collective decision that refused any economic rationality in the determination of prices. At the point of production, the primary lever of antagonism was the wage struggle, in which worker power was exercised in a refusal to link wage levels to productivity, insisting the wage be treated as an “independent variable.” The mutation represented by the events of 1977, in which the logic of needs and antagonism gives way to desire and flight, is where The Soul at Work really begins. For what is at stake in its story is the aftermath of this mass defection from factory discipline, this unilateral withdrawal from the social pact drawn up by capital and its partners, the unions and the worker parties, in view of “saving” the Italian economy after the war. It asks: how has the sphere of desire, the field of the imaginary and the affective, whose affirmation as the fundamental field of the political once led to a collective abandonment of the sphere of work, been transformed into the privileged force in the contemporary order of work, the privileged moment in the production of value? Desire braids together emotional, linguistic, cognitive and imaginary energies that affirmed themselves against the regime of work in the 1960s and 1970s, a refusal that is then paradoxically put to work by capital itself. This colonization of the soul and its desire—the entry of the soul itself into the production process—spawns paradoxical effects. It transforms labor-power into what managerial theories call human capital, harnessing and putting to work not an abstract, general force of labor, but the particularity, the unique combination of psychic, cognitive and affective powers I bring to the labor process. Because this contemporary reformatting functions through the incitement of my specific creative and intellectual powers, I experience work as the segment of social life in which I am most free, most capable of realizing my desires: most myself.
Soul at Work analyzes the contemporary dynamics of capital in its “cognitive” phase using a method it calls compositionism. This term is used by Bifo to avoid the misconceptions induced by the use of operaismo—workerism—to describe the specifically Italian current of Marxism he both inherits and breaks with. Though strictly speaking the phase of classical operaismo begins in the early 1960s and ends with the dissolution of the group Potere Operaio (within which Bifo militated) in 1973, the larger field of compositionist thought remains very active today, encompassing a wide range of tendencies represented by thinkers such as Paolo Virno, Antonio Negri, and Maurizio Lazzarato. This tradition is founded on three imbricated theoretical breakthroughs: the axiom asserting the primacy of worker’s struggles in the development of capital, the study of the changing composition of the working class as the key for deciphering novel forms of political organization and action, and Marx’s description (in the Grundrisse) of the emergence of the “general intellect” as a form of worker power that threatens to destroy the bases for organizing production to extort surplus-value. The first concept requires that every analysis of the changing structure of capital be understood not on the basis of the internal contradictions of capital itself, but as a certain response to, and use of, proletarian aggression: worker insubordination alone initiates restructuration on the part of capital. This response, in which the organic composition of capital—the ratio of fixed to variable capital—undergoes a mutation, induces a recomposition of the internal consistency of the working class. This axiom of the priority of worker refusal required, in turn, the development of a phenomenology of proletarian experience. This phenomenology described the changing internal composition of the various layers of the working class, identifying emerging strata that would assume a dominant role in the immediate process of production: for example, the increasing importance of the mass worker in the Fordist factory, after the hegemony of the skilled worker of earlier social compositions. On the basis of this analysis of the different strata of the working class, novel political forms of organization and action—beyond the Leninist party and its revolutionary strategy—adequate to this composition. Finally, the thesis on the “general intellect,” in which Marx sees the use of automation in the production process reaching a moment when labor-time can no longer be posited as the measure of value, implies both of the preceding concepts: the move to an increasingly automated system of production is seen as a response to worker struggles around the working day, while the positing of the intellect and knowledge as a productive force implies a change within the composition of the working class, with certain sectors (in Bifo’s analysis, the cognitariat) emerging as the paradigmatic form of labor. Insofar as the method of class composition is undertaken in view of seeking out novel openings in the social war—its elevation to another level of complexity and intensity—the specter of a labor process increasingly founded on the production and management of knowledge initiated, an erosion of the classical division of labor and its corresponding organizational diagrams. Placing pressure on Marx’s analysis of the general intellect allowed the militants of the compositionist tradition to diagram a series of mutations in the dynamics of contemporary class antagonism. The collapse of the distinction between conception and execution, between managing production and production itself, threatened to generalize the site of conflict to society as a whole, diminishing the absolute privilege accorded the factory as the unique point of production and exploitation.
The Soul at Work begins from these analytical premises. Using the thesis of the general intellect as a starting point to describe the dynamics of cognitive capital, it reformats this concept to include the range of emotional, affective and aesthetic textures and experiences that are deployed in the contemporary experience of work, and gives it another name: soul. From there, The Soul at Work explains the emergence of the current regime of accumulation as a reaction to the intensification of proletarian refusal to work that began in the 1960s and reached its peak—the point of mass defection from the factories and the wage-relation—in 1977, with the proliferation of areas of autonomy and the supplanting of worker needs with communist desire. And most importantly, it attempts to decipher the possible forms of politics opened by a new class composition whose paradigm is the cognitive worker. What mutations in the forms and vectors of politics are implied by the definitive implosion of the Leninist schema of the Party and the revolutionary destruction of the bourgeois state? In other words, what are the possibilities of communism today, in a post-political moment when the classical forms of organization and action corresponding to an earlier class composition have withered away?
We’re starting to talk about communism again these days. We don’t know yet what it is, but it’s what we want. The enigmatic final lines of The Soul at Work ask us to contemplate the possibility of a communism that is no longer the “principle of a new totalization,” but an endless process of constituting poles of autonomy communicating via “therapeutic contagion.” Politics, Bifo suggests, still belongs to the order of totality. Whether understood as the management of social conflict through the mediation of the State and the forms of juridical equivalence, or as the practice of an irreducible antagonism, the political has always been wedded to the logical and metaphysical categories of totality and negation. Communism means the withering away of the political. But the post-political era opens not onto an administration of things, as Engels once dreamed, but to what is here daringly called therapy—that is, with the articulation of “happy singularizations” that defect from the metropolitan factory of unhappiness.
The call-to-arms sounded by the Bolognese autonomo-punk journal A/traverso (founded by Bifo in 1975) was “the practice of happiness is subversive when it’s collective.” This call still resonates, however muffled. Today, we can add: happiness is collective only when it produces singularities. Bifo calls the contemporary organization of production in which the soul and its affective, linguistic and cognitive powers are put to work the factory of unhappiness because the primary function of the work the post-Fordist factory commands is not the creation of value but the fabrication of subjectivities—the modeling of psychic space and the induction of psychopathologies as a technique of control. In a phase of capitalist development in which the quantity of socially necessary labor is so insignificant that it can no longer seriously be considered the measure of value, the ghostly afterlife of the order of work is an entirely political necessity. Work is a matter of discipline, the production of docility. When work becomes the site of libidinal and narcissistic investment, spinning a web of abjections and dependencies that exploits rather than represses desire—we become attached and bound to our own unhappiness.
“Happiness” is a fragile word. In a book he wrote about Félix Guattari, Bifo concedes that it can sound “corny and banal,” to which we might add rotten, having languished in the fetid mouths of the planetary petit bourgeoisie long enough to be tainted for all time. Our metaphysicians held it in contempt. Hegel identified it with dumb immediacy, blank as an empty page. Kant was equally clear, founding his moral philosophy on the premise that it is better to be worthy of happiness than to be happy—ethics opens in the fault between the order of value and an order of affections structured by aesthetic textures and the contingencies of space and time. Psychoanalysis taught us that happiness comes at a price: a renunciation of drives, which, far from banishing them, makes them that much nastier, turned back against us in the guise of guilt and cruel self-laceration. In the Grundrisse, Marx admonished Adam Smith for confusing freedom with happiness and work with necessity, sacrifice and suffering. This is true, he thundered, only from the perspective of the current regime of work, wage-labor as “externally forced labor.” But if work is for us sacrifice, it can one day be “self-realization”: the construction and mastery of one’s own conditions of existence, freedom as self-objectification, the making of a world as the production of the self itself. In a society in which work is no longer organized by a small clique which has monopolized the means of production through violence, crime and economic reason, work will become seductive. Labor will be attractive, says Marx following Fourier, because it is no longer work at all but its negation and overcoming, the accumulation of joy and the collective composition of a commons. Such pleasure will not be mere play or, God forbid, “fun,” but what Marx in Grundrisse calls “damned seriousness”: “Really free working, e.g. composing, is at the same time precisely the most damned seriousness, the most intense exertion.”
The task of the communism to come is the constitution of poles of autonomy where what Marx calls the “individual’s self-realization” and Bifo calls “happy singularizations” become shared possibilities. The contemporary regime of work has produced a perfect inversion of the scenario Marx projects—work has become the site of libidinal investment, but produces pathologies and depression rather than the damned serious practice of happiness. The creation of zones of therapeutic contagion requires not only a defection from the archaic form of the wage—in which we still pretend to measure value with the time of work—but undertaking a labor on ourselves, a working through of our attachment to work. The great epoch of the refusal of work required that we go on the offensive against ourselves, that the proletariat destroy itself as a class, as labor-power. Today, we are told, this politics of destruction is replaced by a therapy that is primarily aesthetic in nature: the composition of a refrain that constitutes a territory subtracted from the social factory and its temporalities and rhythms. For Marx, the privileged example of really free working—happiness itself—is “composition,” the construction of the communist score. Now we know: the aesthetic paradigm of the communism to come will consist in the singularization and elaboration of forms-of-life, a communism whose song will free the space in which it resonates, and spreads.