On a global scale, the social condition has worsened enormously since the disappearnace of socialist hope, but the rise in exploitation and existential misery is not the only consequence of the defeat of the workers’ movement. The other consequence is war. War is expanding its hold on the lives of people: they are more and more wars of the poor against the poor, religious and ethnic wars fuelled by despair. The plague of nationalism is back, more and more dominating the life of populations, as an effect of the workers’ defeat and of the extinction of internationalism.
In the first years of the new century, a movement for peace spread worldwide: on 15 February 2003, millions of people marched against American aggression in Iraq. The day after this demonstration, the largest of all time, President Bush sarcastically announced, ‘I’m not going to decide policy based upon a focus group. The role of a leader is to decide policy based upon, in this case, the security of the people.’
We know what happened next. Bush had his war, he declared that it was an endless war, and now, more than ten years later, there is still no end in sight. That day exposed the fundamental weakness of the peace movement.
I marched with the peace movement on 15 February 2003, and I’ll march with pacifists any time they call. But I also know marching is useless: pacifism is the symptom and the measure of our impotence. In fact, only internationalism is the condition by which we can effectively pursue peace. Internationalism is not a disposition of the mind, not a will for peace or a refusal of war. It is something much deeper and much more concrete. It’s the consciousness that people worldwide have the same interests and the same motivation. Internationalism (as rhetorical as this may seem) is the solidarity of workers regardless of their nation, race or religion.
But the moment of internationalist consciousness is over. German workers are pitted against Greek workers, Turkish workers against Kurdish workers, and Sunni workers against Shiite workers. They have been obliged to forget about their shared reality as workers.
The workers’ defeat is a huge, historic tragedy, Tronti writes. According to him they ‘have lost because they have been unable to become the State.’
I think the contrary is true.
Communism turned into a totalitarian nightmare because Leninism pushed workers to take hold of the state, to identify with the socialist state, so the statalization of the working class has paralysed the social dynamics and has forced the autonomous process of social emancipation into a fixed political structure.
In the Soviet empire, the result has been a miserable society and an authoritarian state: real communism has cancelled the possible communism that was inscribed in the social composition of work, and in the autonomy of the general intellect.
The Frigid Game
As connective engines are embedded in the general intellect, the social body is separated from its brain.
Subjected to the rules of work – precarious and fractured – cognitive activity becomes part of a process of cooperation that is disembodied and deterritorialized.
This is why the social body has lost contact with its brain: the production of knowledge and technology is deployed in a privatized corporate space which is disconnected from the needs of society, and responds only to economic requirements of profit maximization.
Disconnected from the body, the social brain becomes incapable of autonomy.
Disconnected from the brain, the social body becomes incapable of strategy or empathy.
Within the new dimension of networked production, the individual body is simultaneously exposed to constant intensification of neural stimulation, and insulated from the physical presence of others: everyone lives in the same condition of nervous electrostimulation. The hyper-stimulated body is simultaneously alone and hyper-connected: the more it is connected, the more it is alone.
The social corporeality, however, cannot be dissolved, so it resurfaces, de-cerebrated and disconnected from intellectual cooperation, unable to pursue a common strategy.
The technical subsumption of cognitive activity is based on the ability to capture attention.
At the end of the ’70s the first video games appeared on the market.
In the bars of Italian cities, electronic video games replaced the old mechanical pinball machines. Video games came in large metal boxes, with coloured screens where small green aliens invaded Earth and warriors in black responded with weapons flashing. Sooner or later the game ended and two fatal words appeared on the screen: game over.
In that kind of primordial video game, the machine always eventually won, regardless of the ability or speed of the player.
Machines playing against their human creators, and winning, as their human creator had built the game in such a way that the machine could not be defeated. Now we live in the world of embedded game over: the automaton is winning by design.
But who is the designer?
The designer is the recombinant force of millions of cognitarians who cooperate within the game, but remain alone outside the game.
They are cooperatively running the process of innovation, invention and implementation of knowledge, but they do not know each other. The cooperating brains have no collective body and the private bodies have no collective brain.
I remember those days when, in a bar in Naples, I played Last Safety for Alpha: the announcement of the future carried by the first generation of video games was fascinating and frightening as well.
Then came the time of impotence. The overall rhythm of information has accelerated. Those flows are perceived as neural stimuli by the conscious organism, while the sensory organism lives in a permanent state of nervous electrostimulation and bodily contraction.
As consciousness and emotion need time for personal elaboration, and as time is short, attention becomes disconnected from consciousness and from emotion. Herein originates the contemporary emotional distress.
Dyschronia: a malady of duration, a pathology of ‘lived time’.5
The epidemic of attention deficit disorder is a symptom of this dyschronia: children who grow up in the info-saturated space show signs of nervous hyper-motility. Only for instants can they focus on an object of attention. Their focus tends to shift too fast for learning, for expression, or for affection.
In a condition of hyper-stimulation, the cognitive organism cannot process the emotional content of the stimuli.
Sexual impotence has a similar aetiology.
Stimulation frequency and diffusion, the speed of exposure of the self to the erotic stimulus have accelerated to a point that it is more and more difficult to decode consciously emotional messages or to process them with the needed tenderness. Our time has grown short, narrow, contracted, so the stimulus hardly translates into desire, and desire hardly translates into conscious contact, and contact hardly translates into pleasure.
The sex-appeal of inorganic matter that electronics has inserted between bodies has resulted in a sort of widespread sexualization of the environment and in the physical isolation of the bodies.
The insertion of the inorganic (electronic) in communication among bodies acts as a disturbance. This is why pleasure seems to be replaced by adrenal discharge. The massive consumption of pharmacological products that prolong the male erection in absence of desire does not only happen among the elderly. There are reasons to think that, more than merely a physical problem, people who take erectile dysfunction pills do so for the psychological problem of time scarcity and emotional distress.
Sexual inattention is a side effect of the wide process of the technical subjection of our attention span. The porno explosion, the massive consumption of pornographic images, is part of this cycle. We are exposed to a flow of erotic images, mixed in and among a flow of advertising, entertainment and so on. These flows are ceaselessly mobilizing our emotional and erotic reactivity. Our attention is under permanent demand, but is unable to focus on a particular object.
A sort