Non-Buddhism

I am currently slogging through the drafts section of this blog and salvaging anything that may still be useful to this project. Seventy-five draft items have been hibernating in there—75! Some are full-length essays that, for reasons I don’t always recall, I chose not to publish, and then forgot about. Some are experimental, often outright weird, buddhofictions that I may work up yet. Some, like the current post, are notes toward a longer essay that I never got around to writing up. Looking over these notes, I still found them interesting and stimulating. So, I am presenting them in raw form. I hope you will pursue the points further if you feel so inclined. They are from Bifo Berardi’s 2017 book Futurability. The subtitle summarizes the book’s basic concern: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility.

Franco Berardi (b. 1949), known affectionately as Bifo, is the author of more than twenty books. He is also a highly unorthodox Marxist activist. In his youth, he was heavily involved in the anti-capitalist political movement known as Autonomia Operaia (Workers’ Autonomy). This post closes with Berardi’s long presentation on Futurability. Here is the book’s description from the publisher’s website.

We live in an age of impotence. Stuck between global war and global finance, between identity and capital, we seem to be incapable of producing that radical change that is so desperately needed. Is there still a way to disentangle ourselves from a global order that shapes our politics as well as our imagination?

In his most systematic book to date, renowned Italian theorist Franco Bifo Berardi tackles this question through a solid yet visionary analysis of the three fundamental concepts of Possibility, Potency, and Power. Overcoming any temptation of giving in to despair or nostalgia, Berardi proposes the notion of Futurability as a way to remind us that even within the darkness of our current crisis, still lies dormant the horizon of possibility.

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Possibility. Potency. Power.

The flight that leads to knowledge is foolish, as it defies the established limits of reason. 25

Connective intelligence [=programmed, machinic, computational, striated, the internet, etc.] is unfit to act as collective intelligence [humans in face to face solidarity]. 61

The general intellect [Marx = das allgemeine Wissen in seiner gesellschaftlichen Funktion als unmittelbare Produktivkraft = in technology, machines, robots, etc.] lives in the abstract dimension of connection, but the individual bodies of the cognitive workers are frail and fragmented by isolation. 77

The perfection of the machine is the reason for its inadequacy to encompass the full infinity of [human] imperfection [= the “incomputable”]. 89

The intellectual energies of society are captured by the network of financial abstraction, as cognitive labor is subjugated by the abstract law of valorization and human communication is transformed into abstract interaction among disembodied digital agents, the social body has become detached from the general intellect. 145

Experience says that money can act as an automator, the ultimate automator of social life. Experience shows that removing spaces from which we live from monetary exchange and codification (insolvency, non-monetary exchange) is the way to create spaces for autonomy.

Insolvency is the most effective way to resist financial blackmail that is systematically destroying society. But organized insolvency is only possible when social solidarity is strong, and in the present condition the links of solidarity are weak. 157

The conjunction among bodies has grown precarious and fragile, while connection among disembodied brains has grown permanent, all-encompassing, and obsessional, to the point of replacing life with the spectral projection of life on the ubiquitous screen. 172

How did it happen that human beings accepted and still endure the blackmail of salary in order to survive? 187

The emancipation of knowledge from capital accumulation is the only key that may open the door out of hell, even if at present we seem unable to find that key. 189

In order to reimagine the process of subjectification in the context of precariousness, I would replace the dialectical vision of history with a morphogenetic description; rather than a field of confrontation between subjects, I suggest a view of the historical evolution as a sequence of entanglements and disentanglements  in the process of the emergence of forms. 191

Knowledge can be intended as the recognition of a pattern that is coded in the present constitution of the world, but knowledge can also be intended as the creation of an original series of phenomena that do not comply with the previous code, and demand a new code by way of explanation.

The shift from possibility to actual existence implies a narrowing of the ontological field: only a narrow string of possible events will emerge from the magma of possibility that is not infinite, but many-dimensional.

Guattari calls this process “chaosmosis:” a provisional order emerges from the possible magma, and this order provisionally excludes other possible sets. Countless possibilities are missed because their subjective potency is not sufficient for the disentanglement of  creative morphogenesis. 191-192

[On eidos—active attribution of form, active shaping of the environment— and morphé—passive, received form]:  When I speak of generative form, I’m not referring to the idealistic precession of the idea but the deployment of the generative information inscribed in the present.  A form that generates forms can function as a gestalt; the gestalt is a cognitive frame based on the pre-selection of our perception reactions. 192

Economic semiotization constrains the dynamics of invention and innovation within the limits of a system whose intent is the transformation of life into value, that is, the accumulation of capital—not good life, not pleasure, not beauty, not the pursuance of the best use of technical knowledge, not the actualization of inscribed possibilities. 195

The consciousness of knowledge is the way to the emancipation of the future, but this way is obstructed by the privatization of the educational system, of research, and of the entire cycle of invention. 197

The problem is the following: can knowledge truly be disentangled from the semiotic grip of the economic paradigm? Has the economist totally subjugated the engineer and captured the artist, or can the engineer get free from the economic limitations and reframe technology according to the higher intuitions of science and art—according to shared sensibility? 221

Building a common consciousness and spreading the consciousness of a possible social solidarity among neuroworkers is the task for the next decade, and the ethical awakening of millions of engineers, artists, and scientists is the only chance of averting a frightening regression, whose contours we are glimpsing already. 239