Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
By Giovanni Iozzoli
Translated by Jason Francis Mc Gimsey
Over the last 30 years the Marxist category of real subsumption has often been used
as the litmus test to materially interpret the many profound changes that the
technological revolution and globalization have enacted. In his rich volume
Neurocapitalism,
Giorgio
Griziotti
argues,
with
great
effectiveness,
the
is
integrally
valorized
within
the
dimension
of
global
hyperconnectivity and where all of humanity, from the Savannah to the metropolis, in
varying degrees, is today fully immersed.
In order to write such a book, two conditions were necessary: a rigorous scientific
outlook on the technological revolutions that have been underway over the last 30
years and a deep slant towards the perspective of anticapitalist liberation; the authors
persistent and refined capacity of large corporations like that of Steve Jobs to
capture value and to continue to enclose and valorize what is born as common
knowledge.
The history of capitalism, Griziotti reminds us, has always been the attempt to
subsume knowledges and the qualities of living labor inside the Machine, ever since
steam looms: with electronics, in the 60s-70s, this passage makes a qualitative leap
(symbolized by the digitally controlled machine and the first automated assembly
lines), when we cede a part of out knowledge to the machine and we move to the
sidelines of the productive process, with a function of surveillance and control. From
there, spurred by labor conflicts, the formidable revolution of digital communications
will begin: a quantitative leap in the valorization of knowledge, languages, the senses
and even the emotional sphere.
The authors thesis is that new technologies in their devastating ability to affect
humans go beyond the historical dialectic of machine/living labor and define an
anthropologic revolution where the very essence of the subject is demolished,
refounded and redefined as bios, or bare life. In this epoch, not only does the
traditional distinction between work and free time, productive and non-productive
spheres dissolve not only is the workday diluted in a continuum in which we are
perfectly productive even while we peruse social networks, feeding the colossal of big
data that influence our desires and transform them into compulsive input, but it is the
very line between human and machine that is blurred: where does our
mind/consciousness begin and end when it is immersed in the flux of continual
biohyperconnectivity? Is there any distinct someone inside this flux? And what can
be properly called human in this post-human scenario?
Terrible questions. The author tires to avoid the usual line-up of apocalyptic visions
and integralists: on one hand, the optimists who have seen the potential for liberation
in the technological revolution for the past 20 years (when the machines will work for
us and we will develop our human faculties free from the confines of labor) and, on
the other, those who fear an irreversible and totalizing digital dictatorship that may
already be underway. For the author, the battlefield is cognitive capitalism, as it
presents itself historically and, even if cybertime and cyberspace are continually
changed by power, we cannot give up this terrain and need to find ever new escape
routes where cooperative and constitutive knowledge is able to withdraw from
capitalist control and valorization. Evident signs are not, for the moment, to be seen,
with only a few potentialities lurking on the horizon. The old 70s activist remembers
the devastating impact of heroin on social movements and compares it to the
alienating effect of continual connectivity that gives and illusion of global opening
but instead isolates the individual from reality and, in the most brutal form of
alienation, from human contact.
The last part of the book, the most problematic, is therefore dedicated to organizing:
do paths and real processes through which the common and widespread cooperation
can reclaim their autonomy currently exist? The current scenario is desolate.
Existential nomadisms, perennial crossings to nowhere that refuse identities (or that
take refuge in those most ephemeral) draw an anchorless individual in the biohypermediatic sphere, with continually saturated senses inside a space-time that is
constantly redefined by algorithms and systemic automatisms created to classify and
valorize millions of singularities and their practices.
The author knows very well that, without conflict, the potentialities of the common
(above all regarding the central themes of energy and communication) will never be
emancipated, despite what the prophet Rifkin says about soft transitions and the
inevitable advent of a new world of plenty, a sharing economy and a common
consciousness. But what is the situation today, how can wage labor be organized
today, while the old methods of controlling it still exist? The Fordist worker
performed an entire cycle of emancipation and hegemonized a wide range of figures:
political program and class composition went hand in hand, but today, which sector of
the cognitive proletariat is able to retrace the modern chain of value from laborer
to programmer? This is the question for today: the definition of a new cartography of
real subjects who get their hands dirty, beyond the systemic macro-narrations.
Decades the classic operaista technique of con-research, passion for activism and
real
and useful.
Neurocapitalism is a powerful book that opens up new visions and, at the same time,
produces a correct synthesis of what has now become an infinite range of writings on
cognitive capitalism.
While most of Europe is frightened about the possible submission to Houellebecq
(the Moloch knowingly agitated to terrorize European peoples), we worry little about
the real submission (synonym for subsumption) of our existence to the market and
profit, now totally deployed in every area of our daily lives and in our space-time. No
Sharia Law could condition us more brutally. More than a theocratically centralized
future, we can already glimpse an effective, hyperproductive and desperate
technological nihilism on the horizon.