Autonomy and Alienation

My examination of post-operaismo thought on the political consequences of the changing landscape of labour by positioning their use of the concept of alienation within the matrix formed by their more central categories and theoretical concerns has led me to the identification of two major internal contradictions in their account of contemporary life. The first of these contradictions has its origins in Negri’s failure to adequately conceive of alienation or integrate a notion of what alienation might be within his conceptual thematic.

The relation he proposes between bare life and constituent power, which appear to be internally valid explanations of an immanent interaction between social processes, disintegrates upon contact with even his own limited conception of alienation. This relation disintegrates because he cannot account for the contradiction between the ideological domination of the commodity and a purported autonomous worker. For example, Lazzarato is clear on the compulsion for ‘workers...to become “active subjects” in the coordination of

1 Virno ‘The Ambivalence of Disenchantment’ 26

various functions of production’ and that the work of immaterial labour is the production of ideological commodities.¹ As such the subjective character of labour, its commodities and the consumers of those commodities carry something of capitalist domination and alienation. I argue that when barriers to revolutionary potential emerge in their analyses the post-operaisti hide them under the blanket of autonomy. And so Lazzarato, together with Negri, retreats to the argument that ‘work [today] is immediately something free and constructive’ because the

‘meaning’ of immaterial labour is its autonomous constitution – the producers of ideological commodities will always overcome the limits of capitalism in the theories of post-operaismo because labour is prefigured as autonomous.²

My examination of alienation has revealed a second contradiction in post-operaismo. All of the post-operaisti who have done any significant work on Marx’s general intellect ignore the contingency that alien labour time is not the basis of production in the phase of the general intellect, but rather the power of the agencies set in motion is the foundation of wealth.

However, I argue that any empirical examination – an examination that I will present in the next chapter – would demonstrate the persistence of alienated labour time. That they go on to transpose Marx’s proposed conditions of the ‘free development of individualities’ on to our contemporary political economy of work and thereby posit a revolutionary class is the consequence of their failure to address these contradictions; I argue that they have confused an idea about the concrete conditions of society – namely Tronti’s conception of the labour/capital antagonism – with the concrete conditions themselves. In the hope of navigating these inconsistencies, I will now examine what the most systematic and comprehensive attempt to account for alienation to have emerged from post-operaismo, Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s The Soul at Work.

Bifo’s 2009 work is an extension and clarification of three interlinked notions regarding contemporary political economy from his earlier works, ‘Technology and Knowledge in a Universe of Indetermination’ and his book Il Sapiente, Il Mercante, Il Guerriero (The Sage, the Merchant and The Warrior).³ These three notions are the ‘speeding-up’ of processes of economic valorisation, the increasing involvement of affective, emotional, and creative capacities in work, and a concomitant psychic collapse of the worker and a resulting pharmacological dependency. In The Soul at Work, Bifo systematises his previous attempts to

1 Lazzarato ‘Immaterial Labor’ 135, 146

2 Lazzarato and Negri cf. André Gorz. Reclaiming Work: Beyond the Wage-Based Society. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999). 40.

3 Franco “Bifo” Berardi. ‘Technology and Knowledge in a Universe of Indetermination.’ SubStance, 36:1 (2007). 57-74. First published 1998.; Franco “Bifo” Berardi. Il Sapiente, Il Mercante, Il Guerriero. (Rome:

DeriveApprodi, 2004).

form ‘a psychochemistry of the infospheric environment that studies the psychopathogenic effects of exploitation on the human mind’ within a theory of alienation.¹ Bifo states that the term Compositionism best describes the ‘philosophical style of Italian Workerism’, and offers a framework for the compositionist understanding of alienation.² The compositionist alienation, he argues, is not predicated on a static and fixed human essence therefore, he argues, it differs radically from Hegelian, Marxist and existentialist theories of alienation. In chapter one I demonstrated that this characterisation of Marx’s theory of alienation is simply incorrect. Further, in this part of my argument I demonstrate that Bifo relies more on a fixed notion of human essence than he accounts for. Following Tronti’s reconfiguration of Marx’s theory on the relation between the development of capital and working class power, the ontology of Bifo’s compositionism is anti-labourist and he therefore conceives of alienation as a positive estrangement from labour under capitalism, qualified in the context of the operaismo tenet of the refusal of work. The essence of anti-labourism is Tronti’s theory that

‘capitalist power seeks to use the workers’ antagonistic will-to-struggle as a motor of its own development.’³ Bifo argues that workers are estranged from labour as a result of ‘radical inhumanity’ of their existence, bare life we might say, and by the systems of control which make up work.⁴ In this way, Bifo argues that ‘what is seen by the negative thought of humanistic derivation as a sign of alienation, is seen by the Workerist-Compositionists as a sign of estrangement and a refusal to identify with the general interest of capitalistic economy.’⁵ This epistemological principle illuminates Negri’s negligent use of the concept of alienation. In these terms, of course Negri is able to highlight the growing exploitation of the qualitative aspects of labour, and to point to “intimate” or “essential” qualities of labour without further discussion because this alienation becomes fire to the flames which make for the revolutionary exodus of the Multitude. Therefore, I examine Bifo’s theory of alienation in consideration of this purportedly post-operaismo method of the interpretation of signs of apparent alienation as signs of the refusal of capitalistic interests. I also examine Bifo’s characterisation of his own theory and will demonstrate here that Bifo overlooks its Hegelian elements.

There is today, Bifo argues, a ‘new love of working’ which has resulted from a new form of labour process which allows the worker to exercise their intellectuality.⁶ The communicative forums of workers’ organisations, communist and anti-capitalist groupings have been

1 Franco “Bifo” Berardi. ‘Schizo-Economy’ SubStance 36:1 (2007). 77.

2 “Italian Workerism” is a further cognate to “operaismo” and “post-operaismo”. Berardi Soul at Work 44

3 Tronti ‘The Strategy of Refusal’ 29

4 Berardi Soul at Work 44

5 Berardi Soul at Work 46

6 Berardi Soul at Work 83

subsumed under capital within the new cognitive labour processes, which has coincided with the proliferation of ‘economistic ideology.’¹ This has resulted in the politicisation, de-eroticisation and the decline of solidarity in daily life. Furthermore, a fundamental part of this economistic ideology has been the creation of the political conditions in which state welfare has been dismantled. In short, there has been a transformation of culture which corresponds to the new preponderance of cognitive labour and the metamorphosis of Fordist capitalism into what Bifo calls Semiocapitalism. This economistic ideology, he argues, makes work the means by which we close ourselves off from a barbarous world by isolating ourselves in it.² It is important to make clear that Bifo proposes that the capacity for self-realisation which work now offers – in lieu of the lost eroticism and solidarity of daily life – is limited to a privileged class of worker. Bifo demarcates this class by separating cognitive labour from other forms of labour and further distinguishing between “brain workers” and “chain workers”. According to Bifo, ‘brains workers’ form a “cognitariat” who do ‘properly cognitive labour’, and ‘chain workers’ do cognitive labour of a ‘purely applicative kind.’³ This so-called cognitariat is Bifo’s revolutionary class, the vanguard of Hardt and Negri’s “multitude”. Bifo argues that the labour-process of the cognitariat emerges from two transformations. First, the digitisation of information allows capital to capture different fragments of labour time that can be co-ordinated as a flow irrespective of spatial proximity. As we know, the revolution in communication technologies means that these fragmented productions can be unified irrespectively of the distance between the geographical locations of the original sites of work.

Secondly, the labour process has been distributed amongst ‘formally autonomous’ productive nodes. ⁴ Unlike Negri and Lazzarato, Bifo argues that these productive nodes are merely formally autonomous because, although the development of these new forms of labour process have been accompanied by the withering away of formal hierarchies of control, the interdependent character of fragmented production imposes a dominance upon the labour process which is, he argues, more substantive than under industrial production.

The concept of alienation in Bifo’s Soul at Work is firstly, ‘a specific psychopathological category.’ Secondly, alienation is ‘a painful division of the self.’ Thirdly, alienation is ‘a feeling of anguish and frustration related to the inaccessible body of the other, to the dis-tonic feelings of a non-sympathetic organism incapable of living a happy relation with otherness and therefore with itself.’⁵ It is this latter aspect of alienation that Bifo regards as the best

1 Berardi Soul at Work 81

2 Berardi Soul at Work 104

3 Berardi Soul at Work 87

4 Berardi Soul at Work 88

5 Berardi Soul at Work 108-9

description of our times. Bifo’s conceptualisation of alienation prioritises de-realisation over reification.¹ That is, he prioritises the examination of the anguish and anomie that results from the de-eroticisation of everyday life over the becoming thinghood of the self. In doing so he foregoes the consideration of the making of the body as something alien that is attendant to labour under capitalism. As such, I argue that he underplays the first and second aspects of his own conceptualisation in favour of a focus on feelings of anguish that result from life in

‘Semiocapitalism.’ In this way Bifo is concerned with what he calls the ‘collective psyche that is becoming the object of exploitation’ in which the flows of signs throughout life are attendant to and shaped by hyper-exploitative norms of capitalist accumulation.²

I argue that Bifo highlights the alienating processes which occur outside labour in a much more systematic way than Marx, but does so at the expense of a systematic critique of the labour process. ‘Everywhere,’ in work and outside of it, ‘attention is under siege.’ Our entire existence plays out in ‘a cognitive space overloaded with nervous incentives to act. This,’ he says, ‘is the alienation of our times.’³ Semiocapitalism articulates a constant assault upon the senses by means of what Bifo describes in a later work as the “info-sphere”, which is ‘the interface between the media system and the mind.’⁴ For the worker, the rapid advance in communication technologies means that he or she must continually receive, interpret, decode, reconfigure and relay symbols that have not only an operational value but which may either impel or dissuade, and are laden with affective and emotional values. Privacy is constantly invaded by the advertising which occupies almost every public space; this gives lie to the possibilities for the distinction between public and private in our age, in addition to my arguments in chapter two and my forthcoming analysis in chapter five. Bifo is arguing here that the assault which we undergo, perpetrated by the symbols in work and the symbols on billboards and TV, is a systematic peddling of ‘illusions, and therefore disillusions...of competition and defeat, euphoria and depression.’⁵ Thus, the ideological functions of advertising – style over substance, appearance over reality, desire over need – combine with the ideological functions of work – competition, success, failure – and thereby create the economic function of consumer capitalism.

Bifo argues that ‘there is no possibility of political resistance to the absolute domination of Semiocapitalism.’⁶ Bifo’s research does not, however, address itself to political resistance to

1 Berardi Soul at Work 109

2 Berardi Soul at Work 134

3 Berardi Soul at Work 108

4 Berardi Precarious Rhapsody 39

5 Berardi Soul at Work 92

6 Berardi Soul at Work 138

capitalism nor to political resistance to work under capital. Rather than examining life in its

‘cognitive labour’ guise in a fundamental way, I argue that he idealises it. He argues that work is done within ‘productive islands [which are] formally autonomous.’¹ Bifo tacitly acknowledges the forthcoming empirical critique and attempts to obviate it by claiming that the organisation of work within autonomous productive islands represents the vanguard tendency of work, thus all work will soon be organised in such a way. He does not attempt to assess hierarchical systems of control in work but merely asserts that command is internalised in the conjunction that exists between the semiotic flow of the production of economic value and the ideology it creates. Unlike Lazzarato, Bifo rejects the connection between the worker and the object and thereby ignores the power relations that mediate the worker’s production of the object. Bifo regards the worker’s interaction with the object as just one link in a chain of semiotic production. Furthermore, he appears to regard the production of any given sign as something which initially has its origins in a set of norms outside of the particular labour-process, thereby reducing the worker to an interpreter, decoder and relayer of signs with no awareness of or desire for propriety over the objects he or she creates. If the cognitariat are the class of creative workers, yet remain subject to the governance of these norms, surely something other than ‘gratuitous, pleasurable and erotic contact’ is alienated in this process?² Both the object and the labour-process we are discussing here is communicative, but Bifo disregards that the communication must necessarily, by definition, be political. Bifo ignores the political aspect of production thus rejecting without examination that work itself can be a site of political resistance.