The Multitude Strikes Back?: Boredom in an Age of Semiocapitalism

One of the most compelling arguments put forward by the so-called ‘autonomist’ tradition of Marxist thought is that the very affective and emotional registers of our lives are shaped fundamentally by transformations in the productive process now unfolding in the technologically-advanced societies of the global North. As such, the formation of subjectivity itself has become the privileged terrain of class struggle. Of special significance in this regard is the epochal shift from ‘Fordist’ to ‘post-Fordist’ capitalism, wherein the full gamut of workers’ linguistic, cognitive and affective capacities, particularly as they are utilized collectively in digitalised communicative networks of global range, now take centre-stage. But although autonomist thinkers like Franco (‘Bifo’) Berardi or Paolo Virno talk about such affective states as anxiety, depression, indifference or panic in relation to what the latter calls a ‘materialist phenomenology’, they do not address in any sustained fashion what many regard as the most common mood or affect of our times - namely, that of boredom. This essay will speculate as to how boredom, understood as a tangible if characteristically ambivalent (and ambient) mood or affective condition that relates to modes of capitalist production in specific ways, might be treated according to something broadly resembling an autonomist perspective. Some of the questions addressed are: is there a specifically twenty-first-century boredom? If so, does it retain any of the incipiently resistant or even ‘utopian’ qualities that some have said might be found in the type of boredom more characteristic of the ‘classical’ phase of industrial capitalism? Are there qualitative changes in the way we are situated in time-space during the era of what Bifo calls ‘semiocapitalism’? Finally, how might such a transformation in our body-mind relate to boredom, especially with regard to the perpetual speed-up in such things as informational and semiotic flow, and ever-tightening and accelerating circuits of capitalist valorisation?