We Need to Talk About Bifo
Franco 'Bifo' Berardi, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide
Verso, 224pp, £7.99, ISBN 9781781685785
reviewed by Robert Barry
I have been getting worried about Franco Berardi. He seems upset. Should someone be checking up on him? From the evidence of his latest book for Verso, Heroes, the Italian writer and activist, known as Bifo, is in the midst of one god-awful funk: obsessing over catastrophe, spending all his time reading dubious websites composed of mass-murderers’ manifestos, seemingly incapable of finding enjoyment in any other form of media. ‘Why,’ he asks repeatedly throughout the text, ‘did I write such a horrible book?’ as if staggered by the depths disclosed by his own words. Unusually, then, for a work by a prominent critical theorist, Heroes reads less like analysis then symptom.
Ostensibly the self-confessed ‘horrible book’ is about ‘mass murder and suicide’ (as the subtitle declares). It reads like a catalogue of contemporary nightmares: from Columbine to Anders Breivik to Virginia Tech to Lee Rigby – each chapter a screaming tabloid headline spun out in all its macabre particulars. But Heroes is just as much a chilling portrait of an intellectual’s descent into the mire. For, disturbingly, Berardi regards the former, mass murder, as substitute for the latter; that is, as ‘suicide by proxy.’ And he regards the latter, suicide, as ‘the most significant political act.’
In some respects, Heroes picks up where After the Future, his 2011 collection for AK Press, left off. In that book, Berardi detailed the ‘slow cancellation of the future’ since 1977 as the West moved beyond modernity and fear took hold, replacing Enlightenment progressivism. 1977 remains the turning point for Bifo. Riffing on a long quote from Hito Steyerl’s The Wretched of the Screen (itself prefaced, and presumably somewhat influenced, by Berardi), 1977 now becomes the year the heroes disappeared, or were ‘transferred to another dimension’ and ‘turned into ghosts.’ Heroes, then, is a book about heroes after heroes – the monstrous heroes that haunt the end of history: people like John Holmes and Mohamed Atta.
But After the Future remained a work of activist literature. It was written, in part, ‘in the midst of the movement for global justice,’ as its author’s introduction declares, and collects numerous essays written in support of or inspired by protests and campaigns of one sort or another during the course of what Berardi calls the ‘zero zero decade.’ Heroes is something else. All it can advocate is irony and withdrawal, a generalised scepticism towards anything and everything – including itself: ‘don’t take me too seriously’ the final few paragraphs plead, ‘don’t believe (me).’ It’s an odd way to end a book, to say the least.
When, a few years back, I read After the Future, the line I found least convincing at the time concerned technology. It referred to Rose Goldsen’s 1977 book, Show and Tell Machine, in which the Cornell sociology professor argued the humans then being born ‘will learn more words from machines than from mothers. In the first decade of the new century,’ Bifo continued, ‘this generation has occupied the stage of social activity, and is ready to become compatible with the digital flow.’ He didn’t press the point so much back then. It just sort of hung there and it struck me at the time as oddly reactionary.
The line is repeated in Heroes. But here it starts to become something else. ‘The fact that human beings learn more vocabulary from a machine than from their mothers is undeniably leading to the development of a new kind of sensibility.’ In the four years since After the Future, this notion has passed from being a prediction in an old book to a ‘fact’ with ‘undeniable’ consequences. It’s these consequences that are interesting (regardless of the facticity of their supposed cause).
Bifo talks about ‘the dissociation of language learning from the bodily affective experience’; he talks about ‘the virtualization of the experience of the other.’ What is at stake is ‘sensibility … the interpersonal film that makes possible the empathic perception of the other.’ The erosion of sensibility and the possibility for empathic understanding are symptoms of a precariousness that is more than just a condition of work but a condition of the psyche: a fragmentation of time, time ‘turned into a vortex of depersonalized, fragmentary substance that can be acquired by the capitalist and recombined by the network machine.’
Bifo’s conception is at once political, psychological, and technological. It points to the junction of zero hours contracts and Amazon Mechanical Turk, social media and affective labour, internet time and working time, the human psyche instrumentalised by evermore intimate machines into a primary unit of production. In this way Berardi becomes an unlikely theorist of technology (a consequence, perhaps, of his engagement with Steyerl’s writing). It is as though he could become a futurist only having mourned the future. For this reason, it is necessary to continue to think – and talk – about Bifo.
Ostensibly the self-confessed ‘horrible book’ is about ‘mass murder and suicide’ (as the subtitle declares). It reads like a catalogue of contemporary nightmares: from Columbine to Anders Breivik to Virginia Tech to Lee Rigby – each chapter a screaming tabloid headline spun out in all its macabre particulars. But Heroes is just as much a chilling portrait of an intellectual’s descent into the mire. For, disturbingly, Berardi regards the former, mass murder, as substitute for the latter; that is, as ‘suicide by proxy.’ And he regards the latter, suicide, as ‘the most significant political act.’
In some respects, Heroes picks up where After the Future, his 2011 collection for AK Press, left off. In that book, Berardi detailed the ‘slow cancellation of the future’ since 1977 as the West moved beyond modernity and fear took hold, replacing Enlightenment progressivism. 1977 remains the turning point for Bifo. Riffing on a long quote from Hito Steyerl’s The Wretched of the Screen (itself prefaced, and presumably somewhat influenced, by Berardi), 1977 now becomes the year the heroes disappeared, or were ‘transferred to another dimension’ and ‘turned into ghosts.’ Heroes, then, is a book about heroes after heroes – the monstrous heroes that haunt the end of history: people like John Holmes and Mohamed Atta.
But After the Future remained a work of activist literature. It was written, in part, ‘in the midst of the movement for global justice,’ as its author’s introduction declares, and collects numerous essays written in support of or inspired by protests and campaigns of one sort or another during the course of what Berardi calls the ‘zero zero decade.’ Heroes is something else. All it can advocate is irony and withdrawal, a generalised scepticism towards anything and everything – including itself: ‘don’t take me too seriously’ the final few paragraphs plead, ‘don’t believe (me).’ It’s an odd way to end a book, to say the least.
When, a few years back, I read After the Future, the line I found least convincing at the time concerned technology. It referred to Rose Goldsen’s 1977 book, Show and Tell Machine, in which the Cornell sociology professor argued the humans then being born ‘will learn more words from machines than from mothers. In the first decade of the new century,’ Bifo continued, ‘this generation has occupied the stage of social activity, and is ready to become compatible with the digital flow.’ He didn’t press the point so much back then. It just sort of hung there and it struck me at the time as oddly reactionary.
The line is repeated in Heroes. But here it starts to become something else. ‘The fact that human beings learn more vocabulary from a machine than from their mothers is undeniably leading to the development of a new kind of sensibility.’ In the four years since After the Future, this notion has passed from being a prediction in an old book to a ‘fact’ with ‘undeniable’ consequences. It’s these consequences that are interesting (regardless of the facticity of their supposed cause).
Bifo talks about ‘the dissociation of language learning from the bodily affective experience’; he talks about ‘the virtualization of the experience of the other.’ What is at stake is ‘sensibility … the interpersonal film that makes possible the empathic perception of the other.’ The erosion of sensibility and the possibility for empathic understanding are symptoms of a precariousness that is more than just a condition of work but a condition of the psyche: a fragmentation of time, time ‘turned into a vortex of depersonalized, fragmentary substance that can be acquired by the capitalist and recombined by the network machine.’
Bifo’s conception is at once political, psychological, and technological. It points to the junction of zero hours contracts and Amazon Mechanical Turk, social media and affective labour, internet time and working time, the human psyche instrumentalised by evermore intimate machines into a primary unit of production. In this way Berardi becomes an unlikely theorist of technology (a consequence, perhaps, of his engagement with Steyerl’s writing). It is as though he could become a futurist only having mourned the future. For this reason, it is necessary to continue to think – and talk – about Bifo.