It was an unusually mild autumn all over Europe, and on an unseasonably warm day in November, I travelled to Bologna to interview Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi in his hometown. We agreed to meet in front of a bookstore by the Two Towers, in the buzzing heart of the city, not far from where he lives. We chit-chatted while walking the small cobbled streets to his home, where the interview took place, and he immediately came across as a generous man that puts you at ease with a witty sense of humour.
A Marxist theoretician, philosopher, and “cultural agitator,” as he is sometimes called, Berardi’s thinking draws on psychoanalysis and French post-structuralism, in particular, Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis, but also cyberpunk, anthropology, and media theory.
In his reflections on the effect of media technologies on the “psychosphere” of post-industrial capitalism, we find an acute and painstaking analysis on the state of our present.
Berardi’s long-term interest in information technology is not only theoretical. In the 1970s, he co-founded the legendary Radio Alice, one of Italy’s first pirate radio stations, as well as the underground magazine A/Traverso, a Dada-inspired experiment in leftist counter-information. Throughout the years he has continued to be involved in radical media projects such as the community television station Orfeo TV. From a philosophical perspective, one of his central investigations has been the consequences of semiocapitalism, his term for the spiralling inflation of de-referential semiotic symbols, for our collective process of subjectivation.
The diagnosis is not pretty, and Berardi’s confidence in any hypothetical change of direction has thinned in recent years. And who can blame him? The horizon of planetary and psychological disaster, already foreseen in the darkest passages of his books, today seems almost inevitable, rushing towards us at high speed. Nevertheless, Berardi refuses to give up hope altogether. Despite the fact that his reflections grow out of deep shadows, a tentative defiance still emerges here and there. In his latest considerations, resistance takes the form of desertion, or the mass withdrawal of the energies necessary to feed the growth of techno-capitalism.
Sat in his office in front of a tray of coffee and biscuits, we discussed this strategy and much more, while unusually warm air and sounds of the old town’s busy street life blew through the open windows.
Between environmental disaster, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the recent awakening of the nuclear threat, the feeling of an unfolding “end of the world” has intensely emerged in our collective consciousness. You’ve been writing about the impending collapse of our techno-linguistic civilisation for nearly two decades. Shall we start from the end?
Let’s take the concept of the unheimlich as our point of departure. Heim means home. So it is a question of the unfamiliar, or rather, of something that is familiar but not entirely, where there is something sinisterly not fitting. In recent days, I often have had the impression of living in a sinister, even sordid world. In Italy, first of all, in this sort of political purgatory in which fascism blends with the uttermost banality. Why do I have this impression? Is it because I am old and sick? Nein! This is not a good enough explanation.
There is something more, beyond my individual experience, that seems worth interpreting here. We live an absolute normality: we take the train and go to Bologna, we are tourists…we pretend not to know the list of possibilities of the end of the world. Starting with the atomic bomb, which has become a topic of daily conversations and a constant threat in political negotiations. And the environmental catastrophe, which we had a violent proof of during the last, torrid, summer. Just these two elements are enough to tell us that nothing can be defined as familiar anymore. The familiar world, that is, the one we have known for the last decades, is literally gone. And at the same time, it still exists, and we keep repeating our daily life rituals in more and more saddened ways.
Is there a way to even understand the expression “the end of the world”?
The expression “end of the world” is certainly an almost caricatured expression, which no one can really take seriously. But a very important Italian anthropologist, perhaps the most important Italian anthropologist, Ernesto De Martino, has dedicated a book [La Fine del Mondo (The End of the World)] to this theme, and published it in 1977. Coincidentally, it is the year when, in my opinion, the end of the world has begun.
In that book, De Martino tells us that the end of the world is an experience humanity has lived many times. Let’s try to interpret this expression. It is the moment when the conceptual, perceptive, projective, and affective categories that we have used until yesterday to know the world and and act in it, no longer explain anything. When our tools for understanding our reality lose all interpretative and conceptual effectiveness. Think of Indigenous People of the Americas such as the Maya or the Guaraní. Many experiences of civilisation have been completely eradicated not only due to the extermination of 90 per cent of the population by European colonisers. Above all, they were destroyed by the erasure of the mythological and symbolic references their world was built upon. But isn’t this what is happening to us too? Are we not living today in a condition in which the categories that allowed us to orient ourselves in the world no longer mean anything?
What categories are we talking about?
They are the categories that we took for granted in the lifespan of my generation but, in reality, have a much longer history. Let’s take for example the concept of expansion, which is a prejudice developed though five centuries of European history, and that, in the post-war period has transformed into the principle that literally shapes our experience.
Expansion, understood as economic growth, demographic increase, discovery and colonization of new territories, belongs to our spontaneous knowledge but no longer has any value in reality. We are unable to recognise the end of such a category, and we still consider it so indispensable for living in the world that we can’t imagine one without it.
The category of expansion is probably the most comprehensive, but we could also say that the notion of human compassion is also suspended, or that it has become almost a fake, empty word. Of course, we continue to abstractedly preach it because we are religious or enlightened or something else like that… yet, at the moment, there are a thousand people in the Mediterranean [aboard the NGO ships Ocean Viking and Humanity 1, which the Italian government denied safe port at the end of October 2022] who come from unheard-of suffering, who cannot reach land because we, the white race, have lost any humanism – in the sense of recognising the sharing of human belonging. Well, all this is a way to talk about the end of the cognitive tools that allow us to talk about the world.
Is this world the Western one?
It is our Western world, which, however, we have always considered as the world.
Has colonialism played a fundamental role in shaping the now internalised Western paradigm of existence ruled by the dogma of growth and expansion?
Colonialism is first and foremost a way of exploiting human and natural resources. But for this to happen it is first necessary to subject the populations to what Foucault would call our episteme, bending the Greek word in an anthropological direction. I start by saying that I personally don’t like Foucault. I met him, and he was an arrogant guy. But there is no doubt that he was the most extraordinary mind of the second half of the 20th century and has said almost everything there is to say!
There is a book by him, published in 1968, called The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, which I read as a young man. It is a crucial book because it contains the intuition that before ‘touching’ the thing, we must first name it. Before entering in a relationship with the world, it is necessary that we name what can be touched. Episteme means, following its Greek etymology, “system of knowledge” and I understand the term here as our basic conceptual position in front of the world. A basic episteme is a complex of perceptive and projective categories that allow us to interact with an environment. What is happening is that the basic episteme that we continue to have and use no longer corresponds to any world.
Is it definitively broken?
It’s crumbling, and we can’t even see it.
But we feel it…
We were talking about the unheimlich. We can’t familiarise ourselves with the catastrophe; we can’t. But at the same time, we perceive the fact that some things no longer work. Let’s go back to the idea of expansion. It seems impossible to argue against growth as the absolute value. It is amazing how in all political agendas, in all the words of those who manage any kinds of power whatsoever, any scenario can be examined – except the one in which growth has become impossible. That can’t even be said.
When the world leaders meet at the climate summit in Egypt [COP27] what do they discuss? How to make the world’s ecological rescuing compatible with growth. But the point is all there, if we don’t question that premise, and I think it’s already too late, there’s no possibility to reduce the devastating effect that the same growth has on the physical planet and on the nervous planet.
How does our conception of the present change when the notion of the future crumbles?
It is worth spending a few words on this concept of the future because what is under discussion is not the passing of time, but the fact that for the white mind, the mind of modernity in Western culture, there is no future without expansion. Expansion is the intrinsic feature of the concept of future. This belief has also penetrated the aesthetic realm. Futurism was, for example, an extraordinary experience of marking the perception of time through aesthetic terms. How does this misunderstanding relating to the future – where, on the one hand, we certainly proceed in time but, on the other, we are no longer able to achieve the expansion that we have learned to take for granted – affect our present? My perception of the present depends precisely on this fracture.
What’s your experience of the present?
Let’s go back to the concept of the unheimlich. I experience the present as an inauthentic condition because what I expect from the present no longer exists. Surely, senescence plays a decisive role in this. It’s my favourite theme at the moment. And you could say: ok, this is your personal business. Nein! It’s not my own business; I am so sorry, guys.
The issue here is that the condition of ageing has completely changed and so has its relationship with our overall perception of reality. Senility is the impossibility of further expansion – perhaps even a kind of retraction. And this, like it or not, has become the central experience of Western civilisation as a whole. So, okay, maybe I should keep my personal unheimlich to myself. But in my experience I see a reflection of the collective one.
My own sense of the present is that I’m sitting on a high ledge, waiting. Surprisingly, I find relief in this suspension. It satisfies a longing for withdrawal from aspects of reality that are too difficult to cope with. And yet, it also feels deeply wrong to stare at the abyss, simply swinging my legs over it.
I have the same feeling, and this condition causes me a state of malaise, almost a sense of guilt. Because, for example, we are in a country where mobsters, fascists, and racist assassins sit in the government. After all, nothing around me seems to have changed, and yet I know that it has changed profoundly. Where to act? In other times, I would have called for mobilisation. Today, mobilisation seems almost a caricature to me. Indeed, I am beginning to be convinced that demobilisation is precisely what can break the castle of power. The withdrawal of all energy.
This brings us to the topic of desertion. At the end of September, you released an EP with Bobbie Gillespie of Primal Scream entitled Desert. The album invites listeners to take the way of desertion, meant not only in the military sense, but also as a general withdrawal of our participation in the world. I understand the premise of this approach, but wonder if, after all, desertion is a privileged act: not everybody can afford to desert. Can withdrawal be an act of cowardice as well as an act of courage?
Well. One thing at a time. I’m not kidding when I talk about feelings of guilt. Knowing that, at this very moment, there are a thousand people in the middle of the Mediterranean and these pigs [the Italian government] prevent them from reaching a safe harbour makes me think: is it possible that I can not do anything? A feeling of impotence shapes the double regime of my perception of the world: on the one hand, my experience would lead me to mobilise but, on the other, my awareness suggests not to engage in meaningless things.
But why meaningless?
What is impotence? The word helplessness is crucial here. In The Obsolescence of Man [1956] Gunther Anders explains how, with the invention of the atomic bomb, we realised that we reached the greatest product of our cognitive power: we have managed to build something that can destroy everything. This great power has produced absolute impotence because we cannot rebel against this superpower that we ourselves have created. But what does impotence generate in collective behaviour? Naturally, it generates frustration. It also generates, Anders writes, humiliation.
This great power makes us utterly powerless. We are talking, it seems to me, about the psychological premises of the global reactionary movement which we sometimes call fascism, but which bears little resemblance to fascism. It is precisely the regime of the sinister, of the unheimlich.
Is it this condition of helplessness that makes action worthless?
Let us return to desertion. I make a premise: I do not make an appeal; I do not invite anyone to behave in one way or another; I do not preach. To preach is not the philosopher’s job. The philosopher’s task is to interpret. That is, I place myself in front of the events of the world and analyse the phenomenology of the present. The impression I get is that a generalised withdrawal of energy is underway. What does it mean? I’ll show you a book. [He fetches Italian Jungian psychoanalyst Luigi Zoja’s Il Declino del Desiderio – Perché il mondo sta rinunciando al sesso (The Decline of Desire: Why the World Is Giving Up Sex, 2022).]
It’s not a great text, but it contains a lot of data about the disappearance of sex. Zoja systematises a series of previously known research, including, for example, David Spiegelhalter’s Sex by Numbers [2015], attesting that the frequency of sexual contact has collapsed between the 1990s and the 2020s. To this, we can add that the fertility of male sperm has fallen by 48 per cent in 40 years, for physical and mental reasons.
Desire is a philosophically complex word…
Yes. Instead of the decline of desire we should talk about the decline of sexuality, or, rather, the decline of the sexualization of desire. The desire is there, but it no longer manifests itself in the form of contact. It manifests itself in semiotic forms. What happens is that the desiring tension no longer finds its object in a body, but in the constant acceleration of signs. This is what attracts the desire of the generation rightly called “the last.” It will not reproduce – thank God – and the matter is closed.
How does this collapse of sexual contact connect to the theme of desertion?
I’m currently working precisely on this. My new book, which will be published in Italy soon, is entitled Diserzione [Desertion]. It explores the fading of the sexualization of desire – which is the paradigm of desertion. When I say desertion, I am, of course, referring to half a million Russians who refuse to enlist and leave the country – we don’t get to know how many Ukrainians leave the war, and I hope there are many. But desertion is also, for example, the generation of young people who don’t go to vote here in Italy, and rightly so, in my opinion. And desertion is the choice of four and a half million American workers who decide not to go back to work after the pandemic. Desertion is also the fact that women, throughout the northern hemisphere, have fewer and fewer children, even if the decline of male fertility also plays a decisive, biological role in this.
In The Third Unconscious (2021) you write about the mass depression that ensued during the pandemic. Can such a condition also be read as a strategy of desertion? Currently, one of the most discussed themes in Denmark is the exponential increase of mental disorders, especially in young people. Reflecting on this worrying data, I’m tempted to think that the younger generation’s mental struggles are mass symptoms of a social, ecological, and economic body in a terminal stage.
Yes, this is certainly an element. The central chapter of my new book is entitled ‘Questioning Depression’. But the thesis I am trying to develop is that it is not depression we are dealing with. Depression is the fall of a desire invested in reality. Mark Fisher’s was depression: I had hoped, expected, desired…and look what a shitty world. It is not this we are dealing with.
What we are witnessing today is not the falling of an investment, but the withdrawal of the investment. I do not desire anything, or, rather, my desire is all invested in nothingness, in the virtual, in the immaterial, in the non-corporeal. In the non-touchable, non-sexual. The result is a generalised de-sexualization of the inter-human relationship.
I’m not sure that humanity can survive in these conditions, for the trivial reason that procreation still occurs sexually, for the most part. But, certainly, this is a condition in which the whole castle of energy and expansion collapses. There is no capitalism without energy investment. The new generations no longer invest any energy. Maybe they have it and they don’t invest it. Or, perhaps, they don’t have it anymore.
Is this idea of energy withdrawal connected with the concept of sublimation?
Absolutely. Although Freud speaks about it on two or three occasions throughout his oeuvre, also followed by Lacan, there is no real theory of sublimation. We know that it is the investment of sexual, bodily desire in an object that is not sexual, but spiritual, scientific, religious, and so forth. Very good.
Now, if we look at what is happening, could it perhaps be a shift of energy from the sexual towards the semiotic? Look at the fact that young generations have learned more words from a machine than from the singular voice of a mother, or cousin, or neighbour. That is, the fact that language-learning, which is essentially affective, has moved towards a totally non-affective direction. We can hypothesise that a sort of systemic sublimation is taking place, which consists in shifting the desiring energy towards a semiotic level. It seems to me that this systemic sublimation describes the emergence of a new prevalent human behaviour.
The question to ask is: is it possible to reproduce a society in conditions of systemic sublimation? I do not know this. Because, on a psychological level, this is certainly manifesting itself with phenomena of malaise. I don’t call it depression, but the symptoms of a psychotic breakout are all there: sadness, the explosion of adolescent suicide – especially among girls – and other miseries…
In The Third Unconscious you describe depression as the inability not only to find meaning, but, above all, to create it. Following Freud, sublimation contributes to creativity by diverting erotic energy away from sexuality towards other meaning-making fields such as art or religion. But in the situation you describe, sublimation no longer creates anything.
We come to the question of the meaning of the world! Luisa Muraro, in The Symbolic Order of the Mother [1991], writes luminously about the access to the sphere of linguistic signification. She says: I know that the word “water” denotes that thing that quenches my thirst because my mother told me. There is nothing that connects the letters of the word “water” with the object, but an affective relationship allows the infant to connect sign and meaning: I learn in a profound way, because it is affective, that water quenches my thirst. What happens on the mental level when access to meaning is no longer mediated by a body but by a functional machine?
In terms of learning a language, I succeed in grasping meaning. But what degree of connection with the world can humanity develop when it receives, learns, and exchanges signifying signs in the absence of corporeity? Here, when I talk about precariousness, beyond its social and economic meaning, I mean the fragility of the relationship between the word and the world in which that word applies. And, going back to the basic episteme, the world in which we live has become an extremely fragile world that we are no longer able to attach ourselves to because there is no longer a foundation for the sense of this world, the sense is purely functional.
Language is a recurrent theme in your work, often marked by a kind of ambivalence. In And: Phenomenology of the End (2015), you refer to Paolo Virno’s definition of language as the beginning of the mediation process that erodes empathy and human contact. William Burroughs called language a virus that has produced a mutation in humanity. And yet, language is your primary medium and a fundamental tool to articulate what you call our “basic episteme.” Can you talk about this ambivalence?
Language can establish bonds of conjunction or connection. We are talking exactly about this. There are two different ways of relating to the linguistic sphere. A conjunctive modality manifests through the singular voice and the relationship between bodies, while a connective one is created and expressed through operational effectiveness. The way in which we enter the sphere of language guarantees or not the affective foundation of language itself.
In the same text, you discuss the paradoxical realisation of the avant-garde agenda to break the relation between symbol and referent by financial capitalism, where sign and object, work and value, no longer have any correspondence. How does this connection play out?
The relationship between sign and meaning has been questioned from Symbolism through to the avant-gardes of the 20th century. Symbolism did it in an affectionate, tender, and almost carnal way. Indeed, sensuality is the key to Symbolism. Meaning is found through [Charles] Baudelaire’s correspondences, a sensual warming of the signs.
Then, in the 20th century, Futurism kept working along the same lines, wishing to reinvent reality in the sphere of language. Think of operations such as [Velimir] Khlebnikov’s ‘Zaum’, a language made up of pure and simple sound stimulations that should intuitively evoke the world. Meaning must be the product of a self-germination of the sign which brings about an operational exchange of the signs themselves, disconnected from their referents. Isn’t this the same operation as financial capitalism?
Financial capitalism takes economic value, disconnects it from the relationship with utility, and constitutes finance, a world of signs where the relationship with reality is completely forgotten, bracketed. Now, the question is: what happens to subjectivity? On the social and economic level, we know that the financialization of society has placed social subjects in a condition of impotence, impoverishment, and precariousness.
There is a slogan from the 1970s that you quote somewhere: “happiness is subversive when it collectivises!” A reminder that joy is an overlooked power in our present experience of the world.
It can well be said! Joy is the ability to express one’s energy in a shared way. White culture has erased the awareness that joy is either collective or it doesn’t exist. You can’t be cheerful in the presence of despair. Unless you’re a Nazi, and the suffering of others gives you pleasure. Pleasure without sharing is a serious and widespread disease: sadism, Bolsonarism, this criminal [Matteo Salvini] who wants to see migrants drown.
In The Third Unconscious you write: “I do not see a third way between communism and extinction.” How can we talk about communism today, detaching it from its tragic historical manifestations?
In terms of communication, we can invent all the words we want, if we are capable of finding a more beautiful word. In terms of content, this is what I mean by communism – and I don’t think I’m inventing much: one, the return to use-value. It is not a nostalgic concept, and Marx tells us, in the first page of Capital [1867], that capital is essentially the disconnection between value and use-value. We can call this return to use-value “frugality.”
It’s a beautiful word!
Damn, yes! It is not only a Christian word. It means direct relationship with use-value. Point two: equality. I am talking about frugality in conditions of equality. Because without equality it is inevitable to move away from frugality. Now, frugality and equality: the word communism comes to mind. If someone has a better one, then say it. Let’s call it Frugalism!
Do you have any faith left in the possibility of politics to bring about the necessary changes in the world?
Frugality and equality do not belong to the realm of politics. What is politics? Machiavelli, in the twenty-fifth paragraph of The Prince [ca. 1532] writes that the prince is the one who has the strength to subdue Fortune. Fortune is female because it represents the richness of the immediate, of naturalness, of changeability. The will can only subjugate it with violence and, according to Machiavelli, Fortune, being female, enjoys submission. And here he said it all! He perfectly describes the politics of modernity: its machismo, its violence as an indispensable tool of power, and its simplistic reduction of complexity. In particular, this third point no longer works. While in modern times violence made governing possible, today you can exercise all the violence you want, but governing is no longer possible. The collective brain’s ability to master the infinite complexity of reality, or of Fortune, is over. Today, we are witnessing powers that exercise all the violence they are capable of, but do not obtain a governing effect. Chaos prevails.
How does chaos prevail over brutal rule?
No matter how crushed a population’s will is, governments still fail to achieve the capitalist growth they set out as their goal. A brutalised and unhappy society is an ungovernable object because, in the long run, depression does not make capital development possible. The kind of politics we were used to was the art of governing the will, and the will no longer can master anything. The concept of free will is one of the most overrated concepts in modern philosophy.
I’m not talking about political freedom, but about the illusion of ontological freedom, the illusion according to which I can do anything I want. No! Neoliberalism has brought this illusion of will and freedom to its apotheosis. Politics, understood as the art of the will, must give way to another human faculty, and it seems to me that this is sensibility. How can we re-enter a sensibly happy, relaxed, non-painful relationship with the chaotic complexity of the present? This is the question that needs to be answered. Not how do we govern chaos, but how can we aspire to reconstitute a harmonious relationship with the chaotic complexity of the present?
Any ideas?
Clearly, I don’t have the answer. But, you know, asking the right question would already be a big step forward.
