Edited by Gary Genosko and Nicholas Thoburn
Translated by Arianna Bove, Melinda Cooper, Erik Empson, Enrico,
Giuseppina Mecchia, and Tiziana Terranova
After the Future
By Franco Berardi
Edited by Gary Genosko and Nicholas Thoburn
© 2011 Franco Berardi
Preface © 2011 Gary Genosko and Nicholas Thoburn
This edition © 2011 AK Press (Edinburgh, Oakland, Baltimore)
ISBN-13: 978-1-84935-060-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011920477
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Cover by Margaret Killjoy | www.birdsbeforethestorm.net
Interior by Kate Khatib | www.manifestor.org/design
Page 16: Photograph by Ares Ferrari, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Page 76: Photograph by The People Speak!, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
Page 128: Photograph by Mark Miller, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. All other images public domain or unkown. All attempts have been made to contact the photographers or rights holders.
Portions of this book have appeared in different form in Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies of Post-Alpha Generation (Minor Compositions, 2009) and The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy (Semiotext(e), 2009).
CONTENTS
Preface: The Transversal Communism of Franco Berardi
Gary Genosko and Nicholas Thoburn
Introduction: After the Future
Chapter One: The Century that Trusted in the Future
Futurism and the Reversal of the Future
The Media Utopia of the Avant-Garde
Cursed Be the Prophet
The Last Utopia
Inversion of the Future
Chapter Two: The Zero Zero Decade
From Seattle to Copenhagen
On the Brink of Disaster
After the Dotcom Crash
The Fuzzy Economy of Cognitive Labor
Infolabor and Precarization
City of Panic
Chapter Three: Baroque and Semiocapital
Lumpen Italian
Language and Poison
The Italian Anomaly
Shirkers
Aleatory Value in Neo-Baroque Society
Self Despise
Chapter Four: Exhaustion and Subjectivity
Precarious Future
Exhaustion: Rereading Baudrillard
Necronomy
Singularity Insurrection
When Old People Fall in Love
Happy End
After Futurism
Appendix: Interview with Franco “Bifo” Berardi
Bibliography
gary genosko and nicholas thoburn
WHAT HAPPENS to political thought, practice, and imagination when it loses hold on “the future”? It goes into crisis. The analytic, psychological, and libidinal structures of twentieth-century revolutionary politics were beholden to the temporal form of the future—it even gave the first movement of the avant-garde its name: Futurism. The future was on the side of the revolution. It was a great and empowering myth, but few believe it any longer: the future is over. Its last vestiges were squandered in the schemes of a heavily futurized financial capitalism.
This is Franco Berardi’s radical diagnosis. It is a clinical diagnosis as much as it is a political one, for Berardi traces the symptoms of the end of the future across the social and corporeal body. Cognitive, affective, linguistic,