I am first captivated by the revolutionary cadences of Bifo's voice as he talks about cynicism and irony in the work of Les Liens Invisibles. When I see him in the artist green room later, I explain that although I know nothing of his work, I would very much like to talk...

I will be brief

By Franco Berardi Bifo

Created 12/27/2010 - 19:19

I'll be brief; and almost telegraphic, because I have many things to say and little time.

1. Let's have a look at the landscape at the end of the year 2010. The Obama hope has dissolved, and the European crisis has broken out. A new Logic has been installed at the heart of the European life, since the financial crisis of Greece: Angela Merkel, Nicholas Sarkozy and Jean-Claude Trichet resolved that European society has to sacrifice its current levels of life, public school system, its civility, in order to pay the debts accumulated by the financial elite.

A sort of directorate has taken hold of the Union reasserting the failed dogmas of Neoliberal monetarism: reduction of labor cost, cuts in social spending, school's privatization, impoverishment of daily life. Casting the shadow of a long lasting recession on the future of the last generation Europe has became a blackmail. But if the horizon is darkening, unpredictable events are happening, disquieting and exhilarating at the same time, on the European scene. I see the horsemen of apocalypse and I like that sound.

2. Wikileaks has shown the infinite potency of collective networked intelligence. The event orchestrated by Assange is the unleashing of the general intellect's creative force. We already knew that diplomats are paid to lie, and the military are paid for killing civilians. The lesson of Wikileaks is not so much in the contents of the disclosures, but in the activation of solidarity, complicity and independent collaboration between cognitarians: programmers, hardware technicians, journalists working together and sharing the same goal: destabilize totalitarian power. From this lesson a new generation of rebels will find the way towards autonomy, and self-organization of the general intellect.

3. Rebellion is spreading in the cities of Europe, from London to Rome to Athens, but street riots is not the only language of this movement. What is at stake in the mass riots of December? Rebels know very well they are not staging a military fight against police and the State. They don't care so much about police and State. They are looking for recomposition of the social body and re-activation of the erotic body of the general intellect. During the last ten years precarization isolation and competition in the labor market have provoked the dissociation of the networked collective intelligence from the social body of the cognitariat. Simultaneously the acceleration of the Infosphere (intensification of the rhythm of cognitive exploitation) has stressed the social Psychosphere, provoking loneliness, panic, depression, dis-empathy. In the street riots cognitarians are looking for empathic rhythm. Bodily sensibility and desire want to flow again. The first generation that has learned more words from a machine than from the mother is going to the streets to recompose their body.

4. General intellect is looking for a body The student's struggles are not going to be a sudden outburst, but the beginning of a long lasting process that will mark the next decade, a European insurrection of sort. Insurrection means raising up, and also full deployment of the potencies of the actor. The actor entering the historical scene is the General intellect in subjectivation. The full deployment of the potencies of the General intellect falls beyond the sphere of Capitalism, and implies the re-activation of sensibility. Sensibility, the ability to understand what cannot be verbalized, has been jeopardized in the process of precarization and fractalization of time. For the re-activation of sensibility, art and therapy and political action have to gather. Therapy has been reduced to re-adaptation of the depressed mind to the normalcy of mental exploitation. Prozac, Ritalin, cocaine, and competition have produced bipolar effects in the economy: irrational exuberance of the markets, financial panic, and also in the social Psychosphere: massive depression, crises of panic, epidemic suicide.

5. The fusion of art and activism has emphasized gesture's ineffectuality. The no global movement of the past decade was a purely ethical movement, devoid of political effects, and unable to stop the devastating trends of capitalist deregulation. Art-ivism has been internalizing ineffectuality and the transformation of action in pure denunciation. At its best, Art has been phenomenology of mental suffering: Think of artists like Lisa Athila, Jonathan Franzen, Melinda July, Gus Van Sant, Kim Ki Duk who have been able to express the fragmented social body and the frantic perception of time induced by precarity. Psychic suffering is the main field of contact between art and social action, as the general intellect is looking for a body. The rebels of today are first of all performing a self-therapeutic and poetical action. They are recomposing the empathy of the bodies, rediscovering a common sphere of sensibility.

6. Cynicism is over. At the heart of the present insurrection there is also a strong ethical motivation. I think of ethics in materialistic terms (hedonistic and sensuous) as self respect and self love. The conceptual sphere of Aesthetics is redefining the very sphere of Ethics. Mass Cynicism, that according to Sloterdjike was the prevailing sentiment of post-68, now is over, as it is not paying anymore. The cynical class has lost its glamour. Kids are seeing those in power in politics, finance and military as they are: ugly, disgusting, repugnant. It's an aesthetic judgment, first of all. Ethical choice is based on self-pleasure: not in the universal values, but in the pleasure of singularity.

7. After Europe The financial has devastated the body and the soul of the European society, so now Europe is a corpse, a zombie. The movement is here to invent a new Europe, emancipated from the dogmas of competition and accumulation. Europe will be reborn thanks to the emergence of the social and erotic body of the general intellect. Thanks to the insurrection of the movement's sensuous intelligence, Europe is going to be place of solidarity and of beauty.

http://th-rough.eu/writers/bifo-eng/i-will-be-brief

...Bifo graciously finds a moment of quiet in the green room and we discuss panic, attention and exhaustion before the announcement for the keynote comes over the loudspeaker and he apologises, saying "That's me, I have to go now!"

Franco Berardi Bifo is a contemporary writer, theorist and activist. He founded the magazine A/traverso (1975-1981) and was part of the staff of Radio Alice, the first free pirate radio station in Italy (1976-1978).

Like others Involved in the political movement of Autonomia in Italy during the 1970's, he fled to Paris, where he worked with Felix Guattari in the field of schizoanalysis. During the 1980's he contributed to the magazines Semiotexte (New York), Chimerees (Paris),Metropoli (Rome) and Musica 80 (Milan). His recent published works include Ethereal Shadows (New York, 2007), Felix Guattari (New York, 2008), Precarious Rhapsody(New York, 2009), The Soul at Work (Los Angeles, 2010) and After The Future(Edinburgh, 2011).

He is currently collaborating on the magazines Loop and Alfabeta2 as well as teaching social history of communication at the Accademia di belle Arti in Milan. He is the co-founder of the e-zine rekombinant.org and the telestreet phenomenon

Les Liens Invisibles is an Italy-based artists duo, their work is an eclectic recombination of pop net culture, reverse engineering techniques, social media subvertising, and media reappropriation. Since 2007 Les Liens Invisibles have been infiltrating the global communication networks in order to join and expand the invisible connections between art and real life. Most of their artworks and interventions – which include a virtual suicide web service, the subvertising of many popular social networking platform and a paradoxical tool to reclaim the truth through the fake – reached global media visibility and have been shown internationally.