Introduction to Franco Berardi (Bifo)'s "Technology and Knowledge in a Universe of Indetermination"

Introduction to Franco Berardi (Bifo)'s "Technology and Knowledge in a Universe of Indetermination"

This is the sixth chapter of the book La nefasta utopia di Potere Operaio [The Nefarious Utopia of Potere Operaio], published by Franco Berardi "Bifo" in 1998. The title of the book is to be understood ironically, since it is borrowed from an article by Giorgio Bocca, a leading Italian journalist considered one of the best-known exponents of moderate-centrist public opinion. In his article, which appeared in La Repubblica in 1979, Bocca described the group Potere Operaio as one of the main links in the chain that, in his opinion, had led young Italian leftists from the movements of 1968 to the terrorist groups of the 1970s.¹

Franco Berardi (1950 - ), who has used the pseudonym "Bifo" since middle school to sign both his artistic and his politico-cultural works, was himself a member of Potere Operaio from 1969 to 1971. Berardi grew up in Bologna, where he was a student of aesthetics, and published his first book, Contro il lavoro [Against Work] in 1975. After having left Potere Operaio, Berardi became one of the leaders of Autonomia Organizzata and founded the cultural-political magazine A/traverso. In 1976 he was one of the organizers of Radio Alice, the first creative, politically oriented "free radio station" in Italy. When the radio station was closed by the police in 1977, and he himself was accused of subversive activities, Berardi escaped to France, where he was befriended by Félix Guattari, whose work he had known since the very early 1970s. After several years of traveling, Berardi came back to Bologna in 1985. Over the past twenty years, he has continued to animate different creative, political and cultural projects, and has published several books. Here I will mention his collaboration with Semiotext[e], his on-going research on new information technologies, and the "Telestreet" group, which, as a reaction to the monopoly exerted by Silvio Berlusconi on the Italian media, broadcasted independent television programming first in Bologna and then in numerous Italian cities from 2001 to 2004. Among his later publications are Cyberpunk e mutazione (1993), Cibernauti (1995) and Félix (2001), an intellectual biography of the late Félix Guattari. A book chronicling the history of Telestreet, entitled Telestreet: macchina immaginativa non-omologata, appeared in February 2006. Berardi and his two co-authors for this book have been sued for defamation by the president of Mediaset, the Berlusconi-owned media giant.

In the text that follows, Berardi articulates a truly remarkable synthesis of the most important themes in post-workerist Italian thought. In the first part of his argument, Berardi explains how the Marxist-Leninist heritage, which dominated the Italian communist left during the 1960s and 1970s, was incapable of understanding the profound mutations of late-capitalist society. Hans Jürgen Krahl is remembered here as one of the first critics of traditional Marxist theory. According to Berardi, the increasingly "mental"—others would say "immaterial"—nature of work in post-industrial societies renders obsolete the Marxist definitions of work and of political struggle. In order to formulate a critique of the latest developments of capitalism, Berardi considers earlier theories of the relation between technology and political power, notably Marcuse's critique of "one dimensional Man." He then analyzes the contribution of North American theorists of the capitalist economy, like Peter Drucker, and of virtual communication, like Arthur Kroker and Michael Weinstein. In the last pages of the text, Berardi explains the theory of Exodus as the only alternative left to fight the control exerted by capital over technological discoveries and imaginative potentialities, an alternative that implies a constant struggle to be waged in late capitalist development—that is, the construction of subjectivity and affects.

Considering that this essay was first published in 1998, when the phenomenon of the World Wide Web was still in its early stages, it is quite stunning to see that...