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Nonfiction. Criticism and Theory. Political Science. An infinite
series of bifurcations: this is how we can tell the story of our
life, of our loves, but also the history of revolts, defeats and
restorations of order. At any given moment different paths open up
in front of us, and we are continually presented with the
alternative of going here or going there. Then we decide, we cut
out from a set of infinite possibilities and choose a single path.
But do we really choose? Is it really a question of a choice, when
we go here rather than there? Is it really a choice, when masses go
to shopping centers, when revolutions are transformed into
massacres, when nations enter into war? It is not we who decide but
the concatenations: machines for the liberation of desires and
mechanisms of control over the imaginary. The fundamental
bifurcation is always this one: between machines for liberating
desire and mechanisms of control over the imaginary. In our time of
digital mutation, technical automatisms are taking control of the
social psyche.
An examination of new forms of alienation in our never-off,
plugged-in culture-and a clarion call for a "conspiracy of
estranged people." We can reach every point in the world but, more
importantly, we can be reached from any point in the world. Privacy
and its possibilities are abolished. Attention is under siege
everywhere. Not silence but uninterrupted noise, not the red
desert, but a cognitive space overcharged with nervous incentives
to act: this is the alienation of our times... -from The Soul at
Work Capital has managed to overcome the dualism of body and soul
by establishing a workforce in which everything we mean by the
Soul-language, creativity, affects-is mobilized for its own
benefit. Industrial production put to work bodies, muscles, and
arms. Now, in the sphere of digital technology and cyberculture,
exploitation involves the mind, language, and emotions in order to
generate value-while our bodies disappear in front of our computer
screens. In this, his newest book, Franco "Bifo" Berardi-key member
of the Italian Autonomist movement and a close associate of Felix
Guattari-addresses these new forms of estrangement. In the
philosophical landscape of the 1960s and 1970s, the Hegelian
concept of alienation was used to define the harnessing of
subjectivity. The estrangement of workers from their labor, the
feeling of alienation they experienced, and their refusal to submit
to it became the bases for a human community that remained
autonomous from capital. But today a new condition of alienation
has taken root in which workers commonly and voluntarily work
overtime, the population is tethered to cell phones and
Blackberries, debt has become a postmodern form of slavery, and
antidepressants are commonly used to meet the unending pressure of
production. As a result, the conditions for community have run
aground and new philosophical categories are needed. The Soul at
Work is a clarion call for a new collective effort to reclaim
happiness. The Soul at Work is Bifo's long overdue introduction to
English-speaking readers. This Semiotext(e) edition is also the
book's first appearance in any language.
The changes taking place in our aesthetic and emotional
sensibility: a deep mutation in the psychosphere, caused by
semio-capitalism. Franco "Bifo" Berardi's newest book analyzes the
contemporary changes taking place in our aesthetic and emotional
sensibility-changes the author claims are the result of
semio-capitalism's capturing of the inner resources of the
subjective process: our experience of time, our sensibility, the
way we relate to each other, and our ability to imagine a future.
Precarization and fractalization of labor have provoked a deep
mutation in the psychosphere, and this can be seen in the rise of
psychopathologies such as post-traumatic stress disorder, autism,
panic, and attention deficit disorder. Sketching out an aesthetic
genealogy of capitalist globalization, Berardi shows how we have
arrived at a point of such complexity in the semiotic flows of
capital that we can no longer process its excessive currents of
information. A swarm effect now rules: it has become impossible to
say "no." Social behavior is trapped in inescapable patterns of
interaction coded by techno-linguistic machines, smartphones,
screens of every size, and all of these sensory and emotional
devices end up destroying our organism's sensibility by submitting
it to the stress of competition and acceleration. Arguing for
disentanglement rather than resistance, Berardi concludes by
evoking the myth of La Malinche, the daughter of a noble Aztec
family. It is a tale of a translator and traitor who betrayed her
own people, yet what the myth portends is the rebirth of the world
from the collapse of the old.
An analysis of contemporary semio-capitalism's overloading of
subjectivity, leading to a deep mutation in the psychosphere.
Franco "Bifo" Berardi's newest book is an analysis of changes our
aesthetic and emotional sensibility has undergone recently-all the
result of semio-capitalism's capturing of the inner resources of
the subjective process: our experience of time, our sensibility,
our means of relating to each other, and our ability to imagine a
future. The precarization and fractalization of labor today has
provoked a deep mutation in the psychosphere, and this is visible
in the rise of such psychopathologies as post-traumatic stress
disorder, autism, panic, and attention deficit disorder. Sketching
out an aesthetic genealogy of capitalist globalization, Berardi
shows how we have reached a point of such complexity in the
semiotic flows of capital that we can no longer process its
excessive currents of information. A swarm effect now rules: it has
become impossible to say "no." Social behavior is trapped in
inescapable patterns of interaction coded by techno-linguistic
machines, smartphones, screens of all sizes, and all of these
sensory and emotional devices destroy our organism's sensibility by
submitting it to the stress of competition and acceleration.
Arguing for disentanglement rather than resistance, Berardi ends by
evoking the myth of La Malinche, the daughter of a noble Aztec
family, a translator and traitor who betrayed her own people. Yet
what she portends is the rebirth of the world from the collapse of
the old.
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Skizo-Mails (Paperback)
Franco Berardi Bifo
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R312
R256
Discovery Miles 2 560
Save R56 (18%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Author of "The Soul at Work" and "After the Future," Franco Berardi
Bifo (born 1949) is one of today's most articulate and prominent
anti-capitalism theorists. Like many others involved with the 1960s
Autonomia movement in Italy (such as Antonio Negri and Mario
Tronti), Berardi moved to Paris, where he worked and studied with
the French philosopher and psychotherapist Felix Guattari, in the
field of schizoanalysis. "Skizo-Mails" is a collection of Berardi's
aphoristic and diaristic correspondence that combines the political
and the poetic in its consideration of our present plight. "What
invention will be able to call humans out of the abyss? Who will be
able to gather thoughts and emotions and solidarity?" Berardi asks,
in one letter. This publication is the first in Errant Bodies' new
"Doormats" series, dedicated to rethinking the contemporary
political sphere and demanding a focused and attentive presence and
readership.
Felix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography, by
Franco Berardi 'Bifo', originates in the author's close personal
acquaintance with Felix Guattari's writings and political
engagement in the context of Berardi Bifo's activism in Italian
autonomist politics and his ongoing collaboration with Guattari in
the 1970s and 1980s. This biography gains distinction from its keen
insight into Guattari's political practice and from a precise
understanding of how this practice relates to the theoretical and
conceptual aspects of Guattari's writings, alone and with Gilles
Deleuze. Thanks to an approach at once personal and theoretically
well informed, Bifo's biography provides a clear and accessible
introduction to Guattari's works. This edition also includes a
critical introduction and a 2005 interview with Bifo on a range of
topics relating Guattari's works to the current political
conjuncture.
A manifesto against the concepts of growth and debt, and a call for
a reinvestment in the social body. The Uprising is an Autonomist
manifesto for today's precarious times, and a rallying cry in the
face of the catastrophic and irreversible crisis that neoliberalism
and the financial sphere have established over the globe. In his
newest book, Franco "Bifo" Berardi argues that the notion of
economic recovery is complete mythology. The coming years will
inevitably see new surges of protest and violence, but the old
models of resistance no longer apply. Society can either stick with
the prescriptions and "rescues" that the economic and financial
sectors have demanded at the expense of social happiness, culture,
and the public good; or it can formulate an alternative. For
Berardi, this alternative lies in understanding the current crisis
as something more fundamental than an economic crisis: it is a
crisis of the social imagination, and demands a new language by
which to address it. This is a manifesto against the idea of
growth, and against the concept of debt, the financial sector's two
primary linguistic means of manipulating society. It is a call for
exhaustion, and for resistance to the cult of energy on which
today's economic free-floating market depends. To this end, Berardi
introduces an unexpected linguistic political weapon-poetry: poetry
as the insolvency of language, as the sensuous birth of meaning and
desire, as that which cannot be reduced to information and
exchanged like currency. If the protests now stirring about the
world are to take shape and direction, then the revolution will be
neither peaceful nor violent-it will be linguistic, or will not be
at all.
Felix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography, by
Franco Berardi 'Bifo', originates in the author's close personal
acquaintance with Felix Guattari's writings and political
engagement in the context of Berardi Bifo's activism in Italian
autonomist politics and his ongoing collaboration with Guattari in
the 1970s and 1980s. This biography gains distinction from its keen
insight into Guattari's political practice and from a precise
understanding of how this practice relates to the theoretical and
conceptual aspects of Guattari's writings, alone and with Gilles
Deleuze. Thanks to an approach at once personal and theoretically
well informed, Bifo's biography provides a clear and accessible
introduction to Guattari's works. This edition also includes a
critical introduction and a 2005 interview with Bifo on a range of
topics relating Guattari's works to the current political
conjuncture.
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