On Happiness; on Desertion

The following is an edited excerpt from Quit Everything: Interpreting Depression by Franco “Bifo“ Berardi, available now from Repeater Books

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The era of sad passions

Les passions tristes: souffrance psychique et crise sociale (Sad Passions: Psychological Suffering and Social Crisis) is the title of a book in which Miguel Benasayag and Gérard Schmidt, drawing on their twenty years’ experience of psychoanalytic practice in the Parisian suburbs, speak of the prevailing sentiment in the era of precarity. According to them, the era of sad passions coincides with the era in which the future is no longer perceived as a promise, but as a threat. It is the era of precarity, which extends from the sphere of employment relationships to the entire spectrum of collective psychology, and to the imaginary field of expectations for the future.

To delimit the time of sad contemporaneity, I would start from the year 1977. As the smoothness of the immaterial moved to the center of sensible experience and communication, the material world and physical experience began to be perceived as “kipple,” a word invented by Philip K. Dick to indicate the dusty residues of decaying matter. As communication began to shift into the smooth sphere of the digital, physicality became residue and dust. Nineteen seventy-seven was the year in which this separation of the smooth and the dusty made its appearance, in music and in visual culture, with punk and new wave experimentalism.

Nineteen seventy-seven was a two-sided year. It was the year of the last proletarian uprisings of the century, but also the year in which Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs registered the Apple brand. It was also the year that Alain Minc and Simon Nora wrote L’informatisation de la société, a report on the computerization of society, which predicted the imminent dissolution of the nation state as an effect of emerging telematics. And at the end of the year, Charlie Chaplin died — as the man with the bowler hat and walking stick went away, the last traces of kindness disappeared with him. The insurrection that broke out in Italy during that year spoke the language of desire and was aimed at happiness. Precisely because the desiring movement had made happiness its content, the movement’s end coincided with the painful emergence of an oppressive unhappiness.

The political defeat of the liberatory movements of the twentieth century is only the surface of an anthropological mutation that has traversed all forms of life. Their vision was then occupied by the screen, the unconscious colonized by the mediascape, and desire perverted by competition.

The Italian 1977 Movement had shouted it: happiness is subversive when it becomes collective. But unfortunately, in the following years, we learned about the reverse of that promise. When energy and solidarity ebb, happiness becomes impossible as a collective horizon. From that moment, the collapse of the Western mind followed an episodic, underground trajectory; then, at the threshold of the millennium, it took on a precipitous rhythm: the collapse of the Twin Towers in a cloud of dust was certainly a spectacular inauguration of these new times. The Columbine High School massacre that took place only two years earlier contained an even more disturbing message.

Cover of Quit Everything, by Franco Berardi

Subjectivity in an era of regression

The political history of modernity, including the history of the labor movement and the revolutionary movements of the twentieth century, is based on the tacit premise of progress, on the idea that the future entails expansion: expansion of the production base, expansion of markets, expansion of consumption. This premise made the integration of society possible, despite uncountable conflicts.

Political subjectivity in the various phases of the century was, however, always conceived within an expansive perspective: the communist project, which we had considered the culmination of modern history, was conceived of as an abolition of capitalism, but it was also the full deployment of the capitalist tendency to increase labor productivity thanks to machines. Therefore the possibility of a communist future moved in the same expansive direction as the history of capitalism: it was the final leap in the deployment of the power of technology, but also the autonomization of technology from the form of capital.

However, the pandemic, global civil war, and the acceleration of climate collapse have marked the end of this expansive paradigm, forcing us to imagine the events to come from the perspective not of expansion, but of exhaustion and contraction. In the background, extinction emerges as a possible outcome, so that we have to find lines of escape.

Since the end of the twentieth century (since the publication of the Report on the Limits to Growth by the Club of Rome in 1972), awareness of the exhaustion of resources and limits to growth has been growing and growing. After the oil shock of the 1970s, capitalism emerged from crisis by relaunching profits through technological advances that enabled an intensification of productivity and an acceleration in the circulation of information. Neoliberalism then broke the constraints that had slowed down intensification: regulations, social resistance, the eight-hour working day, rest for cognitive workers, and so forth.

Capital thus managed to counter the fall in the rate of profit with a double movement: on the one hand, the use of financial dynamics made possible an upward redistribution of the wealth produced, bringing with it the impoverishment of society and increasing concentration of capital; on the other, the acceleration of labor productivity, especially of cognitive work. The extreme intensification of productivity and the exploitation of mental energies have coincided with the passage from the territorialized form of industrial production to the intensive digital form in the semio-capital sphere.

But this intensification cannot hold beyond a certain point.

First of all, the intensification of the productive rhythm, linked with the acceleration of the information cycle, caused chaos in the collective mind. At the same time, the intensification of extraction has accelerated the trend towards environmental catastrophe. The culmination of neoliberal reform is therefore Chaos — the systemic ungovernability of social, productive, and distributive processes.

Chaos continuously disrupts the social integration made possible by the techno-linguistic automatisms that hold together the cycles of production, distribution, and information. The set of these technical automatisms that employ artificial intelligence tends to configure a cognitive Automaton that must continually mend the breaking points, the explosions of chaos.

Automata and Chaos have grown together in a dynamic balance that has now reached a breaking point: psychotic disorder of the social mind.

The acceleration of the information cycle and the intensification of cognitive activity result in chaos and jeopardize the functioning of the collective mind, spreading panic and depression where capital needs energy and recombinable order. The fragments of cognitive activity are increasingly dissociated and incompatible, less and less recombinable, and more and more chaotic: mass psychosis, demented violence, and war are not provisional phenomena, and we don’t have a therapy for mass psychosis. So the psychotic condition is becoming a systemic one.

For the first time we have to acknowledge an unstoppable tendency towards the disintegration of the solidarity on which the social bond is founded. The neo-reactionary movements that have grown over the last decade as a global alternative to liberal democracy are an effect of this regression, of this unthinkable, and therefore unthought-of, contraction.

The premise of progress as an evolutionary context has failed. Evolution no longer coincides with progress as the Enlightenment, and in some ways also Marxism, had naively thought. In these conditions, a future subjectivity has to be thought through.

We must get used to the idea that evolution is passing through a regression, through the disintegration of the infrastructures of social civilization.

The central question that arises is the following: How can we set in motion autonomous and supportive processes of subjectivation in this regressive perspective? How can sensitivity escape the traps of depression and panic? How can sensibility maintain self-sufficient and supportive communities?

Climate change, already unfolding with all of its ferocity, is the demonstration of the irreversibility of this catastrophe. Since the chain of catastrophic automatisms has reached such a complexity that it exceeds the ability of voluntary action to understand and govern, only desertion is strategically rational and ethically acceptable: “strategically rational” in that that desertion can produce effects of change that no commitment is capable of producing, and “ethically acceptable” in that in the current conditions action implies unacceptable violence or a pact with the enemy that takes away any emancipatory power from the action itself.

Not only do I think that desertion is the only behavior that can ethically allow us to escape inhumanity, I also think it is the only strategy capable of bringing down capitalism, a system based on the mobilization of social energies. Withdrawing our energies from the social game is by no means a renunciation of struggle: it is the most radical form of class struggle imaginable; the only form that can spread widely among a generation that labels itself the “last generation.” Desertion is the only form of class struggle that may have a chance of success today.

I define desertion in a broad sense, as a behavior that is not limited to abandoning the battlefield but implies disengagement from any collaboration, from any complicity, with a murderous system, and which simultaneously implies inhabiting the world in a way that is compatible with the exhaustion we are all faced with. Somewhere Deleuze wrote that when one is escaping, she is not only escaping but also looking for new weapons, new ways to survive.

Understood in this way, desertion may grow into a strategic program capable of interpreting and organizing a trend that is already inscribed in contemporary ethics, in the spontaneous depressive disposition that is spreading all over as part the psycho-deflation caused by the pandemic.

We are helplessly witnessing the private appropriation of public goods, the destruction of the social achievements of the past century, and the devastation of the environment. Now we should thoroughly accept impotence and turn it into an invincible weapon.

Desertion is an ethical choice, and a rational strategy too.

Scene from Picnic on the Battlefield, by Fernando Arrabal

The missed appointment

Modern history, as the history of the relationship between labor and capital, was at a certain point faced with the most fundamental alternative: I will call this the alternative between the idle and the industrious. The idle prefer to minimize their needs, and so, while having very little, they live in luxury. The industrious need to continually do something to escape the sense of guilt generated by the painful consciousness that time passes (as if it were someone’s fault). The industrious are anxious persons who need to work because work, like any obsessive ritual, allows them to hold the world together, which otherwise dissolves into a disordered dust, while the idle have no anxieties, because they are not worried about dust. The industrious, the anxious, adore business because it allows them to forget their fear of the passing of time, and their fear (horror of emptiness) that this time is unemployed. They are willing to do anything to kill time: they therefore become CEOs, car-lenders, bullet-makers, bankers, and a thousand other similarly useless occupations. Business allows you not to hear the noise of time. So in order to keep busy, the industrious redirect time away from non-industrious activities: healing, educating, imagining, loving, sleeping.

Consequently, in an industrious society, teachers are not thought to educate their students about the marvelous disharmony of existence, but are reduced to the function of educators of industriousness. Doctors are not considered to be people who heal the body in order to make it capable of swimming or making love, but are humiliated in the role of repairers of perennially sick organisms, who are made capable, thanks to pharmacological maintenance, of performing economic functions.

Of course, the industrious consider themselves the salt of the earth, and despise the lazy idlers, because if it were up to those lazy people, we would never have made any progress, we would still be in the Stone Age. This is false, because idleness is the condition of all progress. Properly understood, technique is a cunning strategy of idleness.

Only a few decades ago (although it seems like millennia), the systematic application of idleness, combined with the systematic application of industriousness, reached an unstable point of equilibrium: thanks to Mediterranean workers’ refusal to work, the Nordic masters had to hire engineers to invent devices apt to replace human labor. At that point, there was reason to hope that the industrious curse would come to an end: let’s rest, travel, listen to music; let’s all work very little, just the amount required to reproduce what is necessary.

But the worshipers of useless agitation, bitten by their atavistic sense of guilt, led by Mrs. Thatcher, restored order: they waged wars to destroy everything and then rebuild it, invented non-existent needs, organized society in such a way that freedom was called unemployment and everyone was forced to look for a job, however useless (or even absolutely harmful) in order to have a salary with which to buy those useless things that the industrious produce so as not to be deprived of the torment of doing, not to be forced to listen to the inner time that silently leads us to death. So we missed our appointment with happiness.

The outcome of that battle was predictable: there is no competition between a highly organized army of anxious, hyperactive fanatics and a multitude of idlers. The former will always win. Which proves the thesis that happiness is not a thing of this world.

So we are in hell, because we have missed the appointment (unique, unrepeatable, perhaps purely imaginary) that history had fixed for us with happiness.

Now, the most important question remains: Is it possible to live happily in hell? The answer can only be singular. And my singular answer is: Yes. How? I’m not telling you how, because I do not know. And also because he is wise who has seen a lot; he has forgotten nothing, yet he knows how to see everything as if it were for the first time.

Quit Everything: Interpreting Depression by Franco “Bifo“ Berardi is available now from Repeater Books