Introduction to Franco Berardi (Bifo)'s "Schizo-Economy"

The following is a translation from Bifo's recent book Il Sapiente, Il Mercante, Il Guerriero [The Sage, the Merchant, and the Warrior] (Rome: DeriveApprodi, 2004). This book is, as Bifo says, really two books in one. It is both a genealogy of power and resistance since the 1960s (and in this sense, a rewriting of Bifo's earlier La Nefasta Utopia di Potere Operaio) and an analysis of contemporary capitalism. The passage excerpted below examines the transformations of capitalism during the 1990s, and in particular the division of the world into a virtual sphere of hyper-development and a physical sphere of permanent warfare. The 1990s saw the emergence of a utopianism comparable to that of the 1960s. This utopianism, associated with the proliferation of electronic technology and cyber culture, was far removed from the autonomist program of the reduction of work. It was in fact accompanied by a neoliberal economy of hyper-work.

What is striking about Bifo's analysis is its insistence on the interrelatedness of the monetary economy and the global economy of the mind and affects. What the euphoria expressed so adamantly in the journal Wired's celebration of cyberculture never took into account was the incapacity of human beings to adapt to a suddenly changed environment. The new proliferation of information has a catastrophic effect on human affect. Updating Virilio, Bifo analyses the gap between the infinite speed of the infosphere (the mediascape, or cyberspace) and the slowness of the human organism. Human beings respond to their new state of hyper-stimulation by a panic reaction only partially alleviated through pharmacology.

Bifo links the economic crises of the late 1990s to the new demand for pharmaceutical drugs—cocaine, amphetamines, Prozac —and the multiplication of psychic disorders such as depression, attention deficit disorder, and dyslexia. Disturbing as it is, this symptomatology of the present does not result in despair. Rather, Bifo outlines strategies against what he describes as the totalitarian mechanisms of contemporary power, mechanisms that directly activate and stimulate the human nervous system, bypassing the level of discursive political choices. Bifo discusses forms of resistance—such as media activism—that subvert the specific techno-social interfaces through which these mechanisms function. To use the language of the website created by Bifo and Matteo Pasqunelli, Bifo examines the possibilities for creative "rekombination" and the invention of other possible futures.