The Second Coming

Franco Berardi

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781509534845, 9781509534838
• eBook ISBN: 9781509534852
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

We have entered the gateway to the apocalypse. This theological concept is the best metaphor to describe the world in which we are already living. Chaos is all around us: political folly, economical delirium, ecological catastrophe, intellectual cynicism, technological simulation of life. This is what Franco 'Bifo' Berardi suggests in this wry, dark, disconcerting but also brilliant and invigorating journey through the main events that we have witnessed in recent years.

One century after the Communist revolution, the very idea that the world could be changed for the better seems dead once and for all. Every time that a new change occurs nowadays, it seems to be a change for the worse. But the fact that nothing can save us any more shouldn't be seen as a form of fatality or a reason for surrender. On the contrary, if our world is dead, then the space is open for another to appear – a world where apocalypse can shake us out of our zombie-like contemporary existence. The second coming of Communism will have nothing to do with 1917. Apocalypse has to be conceived of as a metaphor, and Communism is a metaphor too: the metaphor of the possible deployment of the potentials of the mind.

1
In Retrospect

Fifty Years after Sixty-Eight

Rather than a year, ’68 is the name of a mindset which actually prevailed in the world throughout two decades (in Italy, for instance, it lasted from 1960 to 1977).

In this sense, ’68 means the opening of the heart and of the brain to the emergence of countless possibilities, the participation of millions in the same process of discovery, experimentation and universal friendship.

In the year 1968 I enrolled as a student at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Bologna. A lucky occurrence indeed. I had the chance of experiencing from the inside the process of the awakening and gathering of an explosive force that gave way to the unfolding of the first global movement in history.

Fifty years later, I understand that the meaning of that year (of those years) cannot be reduced to a single line of interpretation. Nevertheless, from my point of view that worldwide student insurrection may be read as the conscious emergence of the general intellect, as the first manifestation of the self-awareness of cognitive labour.

In cultural and political terms these fifty years look like a geological era.

I’m 68 years old now, and I live in the same neighbourhood where I used to dwell as a student and as an activist fifty years ago. Almost nothing has changed in the landscape, except the students. I see them from my window: lonely, watching the screens of their smartphones, nervously rushing to classes, sadly going back to the expensive rooms that their families are renting for them. I feel their gloom, I feel the aggressiveness latent in their depression, I know that their aggressiveness may emerge and express itself under the banner of fascism. Not the old fascism that exploded out of futuristic energy, but the new fascism that results from the implosion of desire, from the attempt to keep panic under control and from the depressive rage of impotence.

We may try to explain in political terms the distance of the present depression from the ebullience of fifty years ago, but political explanations explain very little, because they do not help us to go beyond the ideological surface and to grasp the evolutionary meaning of the mutation. This mutation does not concern ideological orientations or discursive and juridical constructions: left versus right, progressive versus conservative and so on.

This mutation runs deeper than that, and it has to be explained in evolutionary terms much more than in political terms.

In order to fully appreciate this mutation, rather than studying political propensities and aversions, we should focus on the relation between the infosphere and the psychosphere, and (looking at the same problem from a different point of view) between knowledge and consciousness.

Information and consciousness

We might think of 1968 as the peak of human evolution, as the moment in which technology, knowledge and social consciousness reached the point of maximal convergence.

Since then, technological potency has steadily expanded while social consciousness has decreased proportionately. As a result, technology has increasing power over social life, while society has decreasing power over technology, and is no more able to govern itself.

In the conjuncture that we name ’68, social consciousness was expected to take control over technological change and to direct it to the common good. But the contrary happened at that point: the leftist parties and the unions regarded technology as a danger, rather than as an opportunity to master and to proffer in the interests of society. Liberation from work was labelled unemployment, and the left engaged in countering the unstoppable technical transformation.

As the relation between information and consciousness is the focus of my reflection here, I will define information as knowledge objectified in signs and conveyed by media, and I will define consciousness (in this context) as the subjective appropriation, elaboration and sharing of the contents of knowledge.

Since the years ’68, and particularly in the wake of the neoliberal turn, the collective mind of humankind has undergone a deep process of reshaping.

The sphere of objectified knowledge has been enormously enhanced, while available time for conscious elaboration has inversely decreased.

This double dynamics has provoked an explosion of unawareness.

Unawareness does not mean lack of information (ignorance) but systemic downsizing of the subjective conscious assimilation of knowledge.

In the years ’68, everybody was expecting a long-lasting process of social emancipation from misery and exploitation. This persuasion was totally wrong, as we now know. Exploitation and misery have not decreased; they have transformed and expanded in many ways.

Today the prevailing expectations are very different, almost opposed. Why? What has broken the expectations of fifty years ago, what has provoked this sort of reversal of imagination?

Let’s have a look at the world-scape of that time, then let’s have a look at the world-scape of today.

In 1968, the world population was around three and a half billion. Today, it is more than double that, although the birth rate has been slowing in the last decades.

Absolute and relative knowledge

While the literacy rate rose steadily until the end of the past century, and is more or less stagnating in the second decade of the twentyfirst century, the same cannot be said of tertiary education.

‘Literacy rates grew constantly but rather slowly until the beginning of the twentieth century. And the rate of growth really climbed after the middle of the 20th century, when the expansion of basic education became a global priority.’¹

In relative terms, tertiary education has been slowly decreasing since 1968, and particularly in the first decade of the new century. In Russia (a country that dramatically changed its course at the end of the past century), the highest level of education has fallen in the last twenty years.²

In the year 2008, I happened to be teaching in a school for adults, particularly migrants: they came from Morocco, from Bengal, from Peru and many from the former Soviet Empire.

At the beginning of the year, I used to ask some questions more or less randomly, just to test my students’ level of preparation. In a class I met two Moldovan men both named Vladimir, and I asked them five or six questions concerning historical events, popular novels and well-known persons like Napoleon, Lenin and Jesus Christ. The old Vladimir, aged 42, formed in a Soviet Union primary school, replied immediately and correctly to all of my questions. The young Vladimir, aged 19, formed in the years following the collapse of the Soviet school system, did not answer one single question – not even ‘How many years ago did Jesus Christ come to life?’

The post-Soviet educational catastrophe, which is not an exception but the extreme manifestation of a general trend, was perfectly epitomized in the performances of the two Vladimirs.

Data concerning the access to tertiary education tell of a slow but steady decline in the rate of education, but these data show only the volume, and not the quality, of education of the new generations of humans.

The quality of education has certainly changed, for the better or for the worse, in the last thirty years, as the neoliberal turn has shaken the structure and functions of the educational system, and has reshaped students’ cultural motivations and psychological expectations worldwide.

It’s difficult to judge the quality of educational formation in different periods of time. However, as a teacher and as someone who has spent most of his time with students and young people, I can affirm that the average young person is today more informed than the average young person of fifty years ago – but at the same time is much less prepared to express critical views and to choose between cultural and political alternatives. Why so?

Knowledge and dogma

The reason lies in the radical change of educational criteria that resulted from the neoliberal reformation of the school system worldwide.

Europe is a good place to observe the neoliberal turn, because since 1999, after the signature of the Bologna Charter, every European country has engaged in transforming the school system in compliance with the market.

Since then, the reform of the educational system in every European country has been marked by de-financing, cuts, job losses, overall precarization of teaching, privatization, and downsizing of the non-rentable disciplinary fields (so-called humanities).

The leading principle of the reform is the assertion of the epistemological primacy of the economic sphere, and this primacy has turned into the general criterion of education.

In the transition from the bourgeois era of industrial capitalism to the digital financial era of semiocapital, mental energy becomes the main force of valorization. This implies the standardization of the procedures of teaching, resulting in the uniform formatting of the cognitive body. A remarkable consequence of this process has been and is the downsizing and de-financing of the so-called ‘humanities’.

The autonomy of universities has been the first victim of the market-oriented reformation. The concept of autonomy had a crucial place in the definition of the modern university. This concept did not only refer to the political independence of the university’s choices from the religious and political authorities, but referred also and mainly to the inherent methodology of scientific knowledge and artistic practice. Each field of knowledge was deemed to establish its own laws: conventions, aims, procedures, verification and change.

During the bourgeois era, the university was based on two pillars. The first pillar was the relation of the inte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• How To
• 1 In Retrospect
• 2 Apocalypse
• 3 Is There Life after the Apocalypse?
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