[Reader-list] Cogntiariat: Matthew Fuller & Snafu interview Franco Berardi

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Apologies for cross posting to those already on the nettime list, but this 
is a conversation on labour and labouring in cyberspace that I  thought 
would be interesting for all on the reader list.  The people talking are 
Matthew Fuller (MF), Franco Berardi (Bifo) and a third person called Snafu.
=======================================================
 From Nettime (www.nettime.org) June 12, 2001

the following is an interview with Franco Berardi, Bifo, that took place by 
email during May and June 2001 focussing around the themes of his new book 
describing the development of the 'Cognitariat'.The 'Factory of 
Unhappiness', (La fabbrica dell'infelicità. New economy e movimento del 
cognitariato) was recently published by Derive Approdi. 
(http://www.deriveapprodi.org/)

MF: In your new book, 'The Factory of Unhappiness' you describe a class 
formation, the 'cognitariat' - a conflation of cognitive worker and 
proletarian, working in 'so-called jobs'. You've also previously used the 
idea of the 'Virtual Class'. What are the qualities of the conitariat and 
how might they be distinguished from this slightly higher strata depicted 
by Kroker and Weinstein in 'Data Trash'?

Bifo: I like to refer to the concept of virtual class, which is a class 
that does not actually exist. It is only the abstraction of the fractal 
ocean of productive micro-actions of the cognitive workers. It is a useful 
concept, but it does not comprehend the existence (social and bodily) of
those people who perform virtual tasks. But the social existence of virtual 
workers is not virtual, the sensual body of the virtual worker is not 
virtual. So I prefer to speak about cognitive proletariat (cognitariat) in 
order to emphasize the material (I mean physical, psychological,
neurological) disease of the workers involved in the net-economy.

MF: The political / economic theorisation of post-fordism which has much of 
its roots in Italian activism and thought of the sixties, seventies and 
onwards is now an established term in describing post-industrial, work 
conditions. You present a variant of this, and one which suggests that the 
full political dynamics of this change have yet to be appreciated - how can 
we describe the transition from 'The Social Factory' to 'The Factory of 
Unhappiness'?

Bifo: Semiokapital puts neuro-psychic energies to work, and submits them to 
machinic speed. It compels our cognition, our emotional hardware to follow 
the rhythm of the net-productivity. Cyberspace overloads cybertime, because 
cyberspace is an unbounded sphere, whose speed can accelerate without 
limits. But cybertime (the time of attention, of memory, of imagination) 
cannot be speeded up
beyond a limit. Otherwise it cracks... And it is actually cracking, 
collapsing under the stress of hyperproductivity. An epidemic of panic is 
spreading thoroughout the circuits of the social brain. An epidemic of 
depression is following the outbreak of panic. The current crisis of the 
new economy has to be seen as consequence of this nervous breakdown. Once 
upon a time Marx spoke about overproduction, meaning
the excess of available goods that could not be absorbed by the social 
market. Nowadays it is the social brain that is assaulted by an 
overwhelming supply of attention-demanding goods. This is why the social 
factory has become the factory of unhappiness: the assembly line of 
netproduction is directly exploiting the emotional energy of the virtual 
class. We are now beginning to become aware of it, so we are
able to recognize ourselves as cognitarians. Flesh, body, desire, in 
permanent electrocution.

Snafu: This consideration opens up, in your book, an interesting reflection 
about the mutated relationship between free and productive time. In the 
Fordist factory, working time is repetitive and alienating. Workers start 
to live elsewhere, as soon as they leave the workplace. The
factory conflicts with the "natural desires" of the worker. On the 
contrary, in the post-fordist model, productivity absorbs the social and 
psychological capacities of the worker. In this way, free time 
progressively loses its interest, in favour of what you call the contemporary
"reaffectivization" of labour. On the other side, you depict the 
net-economy as a giant "brainivore". My question regards the apparent 
contradiction embedded in this double movement. How is it possible that 
people are at the same time so attached to their job and so exhausted by 
it? What are the psychological reasons that push people to build their own 
cages?

Bifo: Every person involved in the Net-economy knows this paradox very 
well. It is the paradox of social identity. We feel motivated only by our 
social role, because the sensuous life is more and more anorexic, more and 
more virtualized. Simultaneously we experience a desensualization of our 
life because we are so obsessed by social performance. It is the effect of 
the economic backmail, the increasing cost of daily life: we need to work 
more and more in order to gain enough money to pay the expensive way of 
life we are accustomed to. But it is also the effect of a growing 
investment of desire in the field of social performance, of competition, of 
productivity.

snafu: Moving onto a material level, economic conditions seem pretty 
irrelevant to the formation of the cognitariat. But, we all know that 
enormous disparities take place within the net-economy. Do you think that 
all of the cognitive workers live on their body the same level of 
exploitation? And what do these workers are really demanding, more money or 
more free time? Do you think that the stress from hyper-productivity is the 
only factor in the possible emergence of a self-consciousness in the 
virtual class?

Bifo: I do not think at all that the economic condition is irrelevant. You 
know, people has been forced to accept low salaries, flexible and unlimited 
exploitation, a work day with no limits because every single fragment of 
the social relationship has become expensive. Before the liberist frenzy 
you could spend a night with friends and go around in the city with few 
money or no money at all. Nowadays, after the liberist therapy, every human 
relationship has been marketed. Gratuity has disappeared from the landscape 
of human relationship. This is why the human relationship is no less and 
less human.

MF: Following from this, in what ways are people developing forms of 
resistance, organisation, solidarity that shift the algorithms of control 
in their favour in 'the movement of the cognitariat'. Or in other words, 
what forms - and given the difference between the 'felicita' of the 
original title and 'happiness' in English - might the production of 
happiness take?

Bifo: Resistance is residual. Some people still create social networks, 
like the centri sociali in Italy: places where production and exchange and 
daily life are protected from the final commodification. But this is a 
residual of the past age of proletarian community. This legacy has to be 
saved, but I do not see the future coming out from such resistance. I see 
it in the process of recombination. I see this movement, spreading all over 
the world, since the days of the Seattle riots as the global movement of 
self organisation of cognitive work. You know, I do not see this movement 
as resistance against globalisation. Not at all. This is a global movement 
against corporate capitalism.
Problem is: where is it receiving its potency from? I don't think that this 
is the movement of the marginalized, of the unemployed, of the farmers, of 
the industrial workers fighting against the delocalisation of the 
factories. Oh yes, those people are part of the movement in the streets. 
But the core of this movement resides in the process of conscious 
self-organization of cognitive work all over the world, thanks to the Net. 
This movement represents, in my view, the beginning of a conscious 
reshaping of the techno-social interfaces of the net, operated by the 
cognitarians. Scientists, researchers, programmers, mediaworkers, every 
segment of the networked general intellect are going to repolarize and 
reshape its episteme, its creative action.

MF: You were involved in manifestations against the OECD meeting in 
Bologna. What are the tactics developing in that movement and elsewhere 
that you see as being most useful? What are those that perhaps connect the 
cognitariat to other social and political currents?

Bifo: I do not think that the street is the place where this movement will 
grow. In the streets it was symbolically born. The street riot has been the 
symbolic detonator, but the net-riot is the real process of trasformation. 
When eighty thousand people were acting in the streets of Seattle, three, 
four million people (those who were in virtual contact with the 
demonstration thanks to the Internet) were taking part in a big virtual 
meeting all around the globe, chatting, discussing, reading. All those 
people are the cognitariat. So I think that the global movement against 
corporate capitalism is absolutely right when it goes to the streets, 
organizing blockades like in Seattle, Prague, Bologna, and Quebec City, and 
next July in Genova. But this is only symbolic action that fuels the real 
movement of sabotage and of reshaping, which has to be organized in every 
lab, in every place where cognitarians are producing, and creating the 
technical interfaces of the social fabric.
The industrial working class needed a political party in order to organize 
autonomy, struggle, self-organization, social change. The netwoked class of 
the cognitariat finds the tool of self-organization in the same network 
that is also the tool of exploitation. As far as the forms of the
struggle in the streets are concerned, I think we should be careful. This 
movement does not need violence, it need a theatricalisation of the hidden 
conflict that is growing in the process of mental work. Mental work, once 
organized and consciously managed can be very disruptive for capitalist 
rule. And can be very useful in reshaping the relationship between 
technology and social use of it.

snafu: I'd like to know what the 'keywords of resistance within every lab' 
that you mentioned are, and to ask what the technical interfaces of the 
social fabric are? In particular i'd like to understand if, when you 
mention the techno-social interfaces, you refer to non-proprietary
systems such as Linux, or if you have a broader view. But also, if the 
shared production of freeware and open source softwares represents a shift 
away from capitalism or if we are only facing the latest, most suitable 
form of capitalism given in this historical phase. As far as i know, 
military agencies and corporations use and develop free software as well as 
hacker circuits...

Bifo: Well, I do not see things in this antagonistic (dialectical) way. I 
mean, I do not think that freeware and open source are outside the sphere 
of capitalism. Similarly I do not think that the worker's collective strike 
and self organisation in the old Fordist factory was ouside the
sphere of capitalism. Nothing is outside the sphere of capitalism, because 
capitalism is not a dialectic totality suited to be overwhelmed (Auf-heben) 
by a new totality (like communism, or something like that). Capital is a 
cognitive framework of social activity, a semiotic frame embedded in the 
social psyche and in the human Techne. Struglle against capitalism , 
refusal of work, temporary autonomous zones,
open source and freeware... all this is not the new totality, it is the 
dynamic recombination allowing people to find their space of autonomy, and 
push Capitalism towards progressive innovation.

snafu: Another question is about the network. It can be used as a tool of 
self-organization, but it is also a powerful means of control. Do you think 
that there are new forms of life emerging within the network? I mean, can 
the network guarantee the rise of a new form of political consciousness 
comparable to the one emerging with mass parties? At the moment, global 
networks such as nettime, syndicate, rhizome
and indymedia remain platforms for exchanging information more than real 
infrastructures providing support, coordination and a real level of 
cooperation (with few exceptions, such as the Toywar). Do you see the 
development of the network of the cognitarians, from a means of
info-distribution to a stable infrastructure? How the different communities 
- such as hackers, activists, net.artists, programmers, web designers - 
will define a common agenda? At the moment each of them seem to me pretty 
stuck on their own issues, even when they are part of the same mailing list...

Bifo: The net is a newborn sphere, and it not only going effect conscious 
and political behaviour, but it is also going to re-frame anthropology and 
cognition. The Internet is not a means (an instrument) of poltical 
organisation, and it is not a means (an instrument) of information. It is a 
public sphere, an anthropological and cognitional environment. Recently I 
heard that number of scientists all over the world are struggling in order 
to obtain the publication of the results of pblicly-funded research. 
"Scientists around the world are in revolt against moves by
a powerful group of private corporations to lock decades of publicly funded 
western scientific research into expensive, subscription-only electronic 
databases. At stake in the dispute is nothing less than control over the 
fruits of scientific discovery - millions of pages of scientific
information which may hold the secrets of a cure for Aids, cheap space 
travel or the workings of the human mind." The Internet is simultaneously 
the place of social production, and the place of selforganisation.

MF: After the May Day demonstrations in central London, at the central end 
of which the police, several thousand of them, penned in a similar number 
of demonstrators for hours, it strikes me that It's almost as if the police 
are determined themselves to teach the people that staying static is a 
mistake. Certainly though, new ways of moving collectively in space are 
being invented and many of those
are being tried out in the street. But perhaps amongst other currents there 
is also a reluctance or a nervousness about doing something concrete, about 
using power in a way that might risk repeating the impositions we have all 
experienced. On the one hand it could be said that this meakness is a 
strength, (if not just a public expression of a vague moral unease) but on 
the other it could be understood precisely as a result of this awareness 
that people have that their actions are always implicated in a 
multi-layered network of medial reiteration. Centralised networks that 
stratify and imprison people in the case of CCTV, but that also networks 
that are at once diffuse but that also contain, as you say, 'exploitation'. 
Given this, what are the ways in which you claim that this 'net-riot' 
creates transformation or exerts its political strength?

Bifo: I see two different (and interrelated) stages of the global revolt: 
one is the symbolic action that takes place in the street, the other is the 
process of selforganisation of cognitive work, of scientists, researchers, 
giving public access to the results of the cognitive production, unlocking 
it from the hold of corporations. It may sound paradoxical. The physical 
action of facing police in the streets, of howling below the windows of 
IMF, WTO and G8, this is just the symbolic trigger of the real change, 
which takes place in the mental environment, in the ethereal cyberspace.

MF: Returning to the issue of the relationship of bodies to the machines 
with which they work and to the information structures they form part of, 
it seems there are two strands to this. One is the relatively 
straightforward attention to the ergonomic conditions of working with 
computers, repetitive strain injury / carpal tunnel syndrome, eyestrain, 
the position of becoming an appendage to a telephone in a call centre etc. 
The other is how bodies are opened up as spaces to be interrogated by 
information systems. The obvious example of this is in the way that genetic 
material is thought about, as something that can be isolated and databased, 
but also as an 'agent' whose purpose
is to deliver 'information' to the flesh that interprets and realises its 
instructions and which we will see as providing a rationale for the 
'improvement' of bodies. Related to this, but occurring in a more diffuse 
way, is the increased emphasis on diagnosing what can be understood as 
information processing sicknesses - the recent study that claimed that 70% 
of all males have some form of autism for instance. Most interesting here 
is the idea of some of these syndromes, such as Asperger's Syndrome, which 
it is often speculated is
one enjoyed by Bill Gates, are increasingly understood to be productive in 
certain ways. What might this suggest about the way notions of health in 
relation to information and productivity are treated?

Bifo: I am not able to answer your question properly, because it implies so 
many fields of knowledge which I have only heard of. I see that the Global 
Mind is creating a sort of Global body, which is the continuum of distant 
organisms connected through the nonorganic electronic network. The Global 
Body is the productive body of the net, but it is also the space where 
viruses spread, the space of contagion. So therapy should work at the same 
level, at the collective level. This is the idea of therapy proposed by 
Felix Guattari.

MF: It's clear also that the means of access to becoming a member of this 
class are becoming hardened as its function becomes more defined. In the UK 
and elsewhere, in the sphere of education there is a substantial slippage 
of the mask of Liberal Humanism, with education 'as a value in itself' 
moving towards strictly instrumental vocational training to create this new 
workforce. (This is also mirrored in the economic pain that students are 
made to suffer if they are to complete their studies). You are involved 
with a Hypermedia course in Bologna. How is an awareness of the composition 
of the cognitariat built into the course?

Bifo: I have been teaching in a public school for web designers and 
videomakers, but my teaching experience is very fragmented and scarcely 
academic. But your question is very interesting, because it pinpoints the 
importance of a new didactic theory. What should we teach to our students? 
What should they learn? I say that we should make them conscious of their 
belonging to the process, and we should
at the same time show them the possibility of existing outside the process. 
The danger in the process of the transmission of knowledge is the 
following: the 'power point' technicalities creating the Novum Organum of 
Science. Knowledge reduced to a functional system of frequently asked 
questions, the digital formalisation of didactics, of the method and of the 
contents of knowledge. You remember that
Karl Marx wrote somewhere that the proletariat is the heir of classical 
german philosophy. It was just a metaphor. But now we can say in a stricly 
literal sense that the cognitariat is the heir of modern science and 
philosophy, and also the heir of the modern art and poetry. The social 
liberation of the cognitariat is also their appropriation of the 
technosocial effects of knowledge.


(Interviewers: snafu, Matthew Fuller)



Shuddhabrata Sengupta
SARAI: The New Media Initiative
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
29, Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 052, India
www.sarai.net