And: Phenomenology of the End

by Franco "Bifo" Berardi

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781584351702
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	11/06/2015
Series:	Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.20(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Franco Berardi, aka “Bifo,” founder of the famous “Radio Alice” in Bologna and an important figure of the Italian Autonomia Movement, is a writer, media theorist, and media activist. He currently teaches Social History of the Media at the Accademia di Brera, Milan.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Concatenation, Conjunction, and Connection 9

Part 1 Sensibility 31

1 The Sensitive Infosphere 33

2 Global Skin: A Trans-Identitarian Patchwork 58

3 The Aesthetic Genealogy of Globalization 111

Part 2 The Body of the General Intellect 143

4 Language, Limit, Excess 145

5 Avatars of the General Intellect 176

6 The Swarm Effect 208

Part 3 Subjectivation 233

7 Social Morphogenesis and Neuroplasticity 235

8 The Transhuman 267

9 The Horizon of Mutation 293

10 Consciousness and Evolution 322

11 The End 331

Notes 341