It’s late April
2022 in Bologna and we meet in Franco’s apartment. He shows me his
collection of collages he produced in the Covid period, his art therapy
to fight off depression. The paintings can be found here and there
online, exhibited under the pseudonym Istubalz. We’ve come together to
discuss his latest book The Third Unconscious, The Psycho-sphere in the Viral Age (published in English by Verso,
translated by Bifo himself into Italian). He wrapped up the manuscript
during the Summer of 2021, midway into the Corona pandemic. Different
from his 2020 diary, the book already attempts to frame the pandemic.
There’s hardly any time for reflection as we’ve moved into the next
crisis.
Before I departed from Amsterdam our Institute of Network Cultures published the English translation of Franco’s latest essay, The Precipe,
on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Two months into the war, I am taking a
break from the Tactical Media Room campaign at home. With the support of Annaliza
Pelizza, I took up a residency at Umberto Eco’s former semiotics
department. Afraid that a debate about foreign affairs, the depressing
state of the EU and the role of the US and NATO may lead to a ritual
exchange of banalities over the latest factoids and expose inevitable
generational and regional differences, it turned out better to instead
take a dive into the underlying mental conditions of our accelerating
present. The message of
this short book is simple: we urgently need to engage with the future of
psychoanalysis. The discovery of the unconscious in the 18th and 19th
century resulted in the founding of psychoanalysis as both a therapy and
tool for cultural analysis. Later, of course, it became an industry. In
response to the emphasis of its founding fathers on denial and
sublimation, the second mode of the unconscious, associated with Lacan
and even more so Deleuze and Guattari, stressed the element of
production. For them, the unconscious is not a theatre but a factory.
Fifty years into the liberation of desire probe, Berardi proposes a next
angle: a third unconscious that circles around an understanding of the
social dimension of the mind, in a world that is no longer focused on
growth and (schizo)productivity but on extinction and degrowth. Berardi
calls for the development of new critical concepts that can help us to
understand today’s spectrum of emotional attention. We must practice
“riding the dynamic of disaster,” which he calls an accurate description
of “our mental condition during the current earthquake, which is also a
heart-quake and a mind-quake.” The seamless transition from Covid into the war in Ukraine reinstates
the collapse of the bio-info-psycho circuit under the weight of the
‘stack of crises’ (my term), the succession of catastrophic events.
There’s a deeply unsettling and often profoundly depressing inevitably
lurking about this atmosphere of accumulating disaster: the all too real
sense that life is on the brink of total collapse and imminent
disaster. With his
psychoanalytic invention, Berardi has made a clever move, escaping the
dull regulatory dead-end street into which Europe’s marginal social
media critique manoeuvred itself. Who’s still using the internet, after
all? With the contemporary art system becoming a woke stage, the old
European white man is advised to step back. Refusing to stop thinking,
over the past years Berardi no doubt had to cope with a strong
fluctuation of moods himself. Readers can easily identify the mental
disposition of the author. Luckily, The Third Unconscious proves
the advantage of a certain distance on events. The medium of the long
essay or book helps, in this respect. Berardi remains one of the few
European intellectuals with such a phenomenal seismographic sensibility,
in particular toward the dark states of the young minds, glued to their
devices. Reading the pulse in this way, in tune with the world of
youth, is something he shares with the late Bernard Stiegler. For doom scrollers, tired of reading nostalgic statements such as
analogue=potency versus digital=exhaustion, the activist Berardi offers a
clear alternative: “It is based on liberation from the obsession with
economic growth; it is based on the redistribution of resources, on the
reduction of labour time, and on the expansion of time dedicated to the
free activity of teaching, healing and taking care.” To get there
Berardi proposes a “psycho-cultural conversion to frugality and
friendship.” But before we can get there, it is crucial to work together
on the correct diagnosis of the present. Geert Lovink: The Third Unconscious is not a
Covid diary. How do you look back at the past two years? It doesn’t
feel like it’s over, despite history accelerating with Russia’s invasion
of Ukraine. Instead of orgasmic celebrations many seem reluctant and
have internalized the regime of social distancing, quarantines, and
lockdowns. Let’s call this Mental Long Covid. How would you describe it? Franco Berardi: We’re in a situation that never
ends, that is always feeding fear. What is lacking is the cathartic
moment, the orgasm, the moment you start a new life. We long for the end
but it is not coming. I have a friend, a psychiatrist who suffers from
long Covid in the medical sense, and she describes it as a condition of
physical distress and weakness, the inability to move on. It is a state
of permanent exhaustion. GL: In The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah
Arendt states that the power of authoritarian rule is to create
isolation and loneliness. Around the same time, in the early 1950s,
David Riesman describes a similar phenomenon in The Lonely Crowd. FB: In my book, I quote the famous words of a
Canadian doctor that warned against sexual intercourse during the Covid
period. At that moment I became aware of the transformation of
proximity, meaning the relations of bodies in space, meaning the
characterization of the body of the other as a sanitary danger. If you
are seventy, like me, this may be an intellectual object of study, but
when you’re sixteen this may change your perception of the future. It
may have a long-term traumatic effect—another manifestation of long
Covid. There is a sharp increase in suicide among the young population, a
rise of 39 percent in Italy. GL: Cyberculture has prepared this condition over
the past thirty years with virtual sex, online dating, telephone sex,
and webcams, up to the metaverse. Sexual intercourse at a distance is an
integral part of global culture. FB: The pandemic years have not changed this
direction, but rather manifest as a final acceleration of already
existing psychological and economic tendencies. We’ve not experienced a
paradigmatic shift. You can see this at the level of precarization and
the virtualization of work and increased mental exploitation. Tragedies
can help to change the course of history, but this has not happened. GL: What is hyperconnected loneliness? This
condition seems to be paradoxical. As Sherry Turkle’s book title says:
we are alone together. We are surrounded by so many others. The dominant
platforms are called “social” media for a reason. But there is no space
for reflection in solitude. Social media constantly disrupt you, even
if you try. FB: Over the past twenty years there has been a
transfer of embodied social time into a disembodied empty time. Online
you are socially engaged, you do not quit society, but you abandoned the
possibility of meeting the body of the other. The year 2020 completed
this process. Even before Covid, we experienced a culture of fatigue in
the sense of regression and stagnation at many levels. This sense of
alienation was already perceived, in your work, mine, and others. The
psychopathology of the hyperconnected world is well known. In 2017 I was tired. I was sick as well and put on an automatic reply
saying that I was sorry and that I was not able to check my email
because of my fatigue. A friend responded that she was anxious that I
was lost for the world, please don’t do this, she wrote to me. You can
say I am old, and a lost case, coming from the analogue era. However,
when I am required to remember five different passwords and pin numbers
to check my sanity situation, that’s causing stress for everyone. These
sorts of oppressive data regimes are draining our cognitive capacity.
This is also part of Mental Long Covid. The fall of 2019 was a significant period. We saw many protests,
worldwide, from Santiago in Chile to Hong Kong. The widespread
collective disaffection on a mass scale can be read as a sign that
endemic exhaustion was no longer bearable for many. I witnessed many
movements, from 1968 and 1977 to the anti-war protests in 2003 and
Occupy in 2011. In 2019 I had the impression that the various protests
diverged and lacked a common motive and language. At the level of
subjectivity, they are contradictory. A political strategy is becoming
impossible to find. In 2011 you had the movement of the squares, from
Cairo and Damascus to Madrid: different circumstances but the same
conceptual framework. I call it the convulsive moment. GL: In the book, you make a call to forget our
origins. Is this why you shy away from saying something about Black
Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion, and related Instagram-driven
movements? Do you believe in the revolutionary potential of identity
politics? FB: Identity can sometimes be a tool to create
solidarity. At the same time, it is a trap. Identity is a
misunderstanding, also a philosophical concept. Identity means the
construction or perception of difference concerning the other. My
identity is different from yours. In this context, I prefer a concept
from Simondon: not identity but the differentiation process that makes
it possible for me to become an individual. This is what he calls
individuation. If you think that the foundation of solidarity is
identity, the next step is war. The identification of the nation in
European history means war, and this is what we’re currently witnessing
in Ukraine. GL: You go to Spain to attend the meeting of the
psychoanalysis association there. Also, you are part of a Latin seminar
of psychoanalytic practitioners that meet on Zoom twice a week and work
with the old friends of Guattari who are preparing a meeting for the
fiftieth anniversary of Anti-Oedipus. What do you propose to them? FB: I am reading Freud and Ferenczi again and have
to admit: their writing is naive—for instance, Freud’s analysis of war
neurosis. Even Ferenczi cannot understand what’s happening on the
collective level of psychic suffering. This is beyond the horizon of
psychoanalysis, even for Jung, who’s the only one that speaks of the
collective unconscious. This indicates that we are on the brink of a
significant scientific and philosophical discovery. This will neither
come from cognitive psychology nor neuroscience. We need to locate it
inside the realm of psychoanalysis. I do not believe neuroscience will
take over. It understands 99 percent of what happens inside the brain in
terms of distraction, decision making, and memory but what they
overlook is the human sensibility. Human behavior is not a deterministic
feature. Something is not explainable in terms of causality. GL: Would that be the social? Your opening sentence
states that you explore the ongoing mutation of the social Unconscious. I
would add the techno-social … FB: I recently reread a book of Félix Guattari that I translated myself into Italian and that I know very well, Le Capitalisme Mondial Intégré, as
he is one of the few thinkers to see the relation between the
unconscious and technology. Guattari is not doing this from the
nostalgic humanist perspective. On the contrary. He speaks about the
potential of the machinic unconscious. I ask: what is the spatial
character of the social today? My current obsession is with the
inability of psychoanalysis to deal with the current techno-social
unconscious. The seminar I participate in looks at this from a Latin
perspective, which may be different from an Anglo-Saxon or a Chinese
one. Marx and Darwin are part of our toolbox to understand the present,
but Freud is no longer in the mix. GL: Is this because the Freudian perspective got
compromised by marketing? We’re aware that we can be influenced in
subliminal ways, we know our sexual drives, many young readers would
think. FB: Psychology has become an integral part of
capitalist consumerism. But beware: that doesn’t mean that psyche is no
longer relevant. On the contrary. The psychoanalytic perspective is the
most crucial now but it is missing. We badly need a psychoanalytic
understanding of the present, more than an economic one. The social
production of loneliness, competitive behavior, and aggression are as
real as economic exploitation. GL: As a member of the Guattari circle, back in the
seventies in Paris, how do you look at the “Werdegang” or demise of the
second unconscious? FB: That’s the neoliberal unconscious as described by Massimo Recalcati in his 2010 book The Man Without an Unconscious—a
subject without a deep well of unconscious desire, obsessed with
immediate enjoyment. No more delayed gratification. In this system, the
unconscious has been externalized and exploded in the social
imagination. Without realizing it, the authors of the 1972 Anti-Oedipus sketch
out the genesis of the neoliberal unconscious. They speak of the
explosion of the unconscious as a happy process of liberation—which is
legitimate. But the reality is the implosion of it. If you want to
understand this, read Michel Foucault’s 1979 seminar La Naissance de la biopolitique.
Several years later Foucault was indeed able to articulate this
mechanism. He understands the mental aspect of the Thatcher moment.
Covid has exposed the impossibility to continue with the second
unconscious, which is dead, but we are living inside the dead corpse.
We’re still living under the threat of economic growth, liberation,
etc., while stagnation is our daily reality. GL: How would you describe the current culture of
fear and anger, of resignation and stagnation? In your book, you pair
concepts such as extinction and exhaustion with impotence. FB: Now you are entering the realm of the unknown
that urgently needs to be studied. We don’t know what’s going to happen
and don’t know what should be done to escape the current crisis. We must
go deep at this moment of catastrophe. Is there a therapy or a
political strategy to overcome the current depression? GL: After studying and describing one particular
form of the techno-social mental condition, namely sadness as the
twenty-first-century manifestation of melancholia, I came to the
conclusion that the description alone is not sufficient. Sadness, by
design, is going nowhere. The recognition as such does not lead us to a
political strategy. At best, we get a deeper understanding of the
current stagnation. FB: In your new book Stuck on the Platform you
are not proposing sadness as a way out. However, what we can say is
that, for instance, Putin is a product of a long-lasting depression, on
the verge of collapse, which at this stage means taking that jump out of
the window. At this very moment in time we are at the point of suicide.
How do we get out of this situation? My intuition tells me that
depression is the therapy for depression. We should go the homeopathic
way. The depressed persona today is the one who understands reality best
and does not experience a desire or see a future in his or her own
life. It is the only person who can tell the truth to him or herself. We
should validate this position and see it as a starting point in
political terms. Here I come to my keyword for 2022: resignation. In Christian
terminology, resignation means the acceptance of the will of God. You
must accept and resign and not refuse. If you do not trust God and do
not believe, like me, even if you count the bishop of Bologna among your
friends, like me, what is the meaning of resignation for us atheists?
It means abandoning the expectations we had. Let’s abandon the idea that
the future will be expensive. Forget the equitation of larger being
better. That’s over. You remember Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful, which meant that on a small level we could find better ways to expand. No, that’s really over. The intellectual, mental, and cognitive resources of the planet are
exhausted, even in China, where we witness a significant movement to
abandon work due to mental but also procreation exhaustion. Think of the
hikikomori phenomenon in Japan of young hermits that have totally
withdrawn from society. When a Japanese friend visited me in 2008 and
told me about the one million hikikomori, I felt bad for them, how
horrible, and he told me he had not left his room for six months until
he discovered the autonomia concept and understood the affinity
of the autonomous stance with his condition. Try to take the Tokyo
subway. Try to work in an office in Tokyo. This is when I started to
think about the paradox of depression in our time. When the social
becomes so competitive, so repressive, better to close off and go for
loneliness as the better option. No more human beings, I want to be
alone. Monastic life gets a new meaning. (This is the original text. A shorter version was published by e-flux. Thanks for your edits, Grammarly, Ned and Mike). |