This is the state we live in, at the beginning of the new century. The ethical foundation of the modern social scene was based on the responsibility of the bourgeois class and the solidarity between workers. The Protestant bourgeois was responsible to God and to the territorial community which made his prosperity possible. The worker was united with his/her colleagues through the consciousness of sharing the same interests.
Both of these ethical foundations of modern ethics have dissolved. The post-bourgeois capitalist class does not feel responsible for the community and the territory because financial capitalism is totally deterritorialized and has no interest in the future well-being of the community. On the other hand, the post-Fordist worker no longer shares the same interest as his/her colleagues, but, on the contrary, is forced to compete every day against other workers for a job and a salary in the deregulated labour arena. Within the framework of this new precarious organization of labour, building solidarity becomes a difficult task. During the last three decades social movements have tried to re-establish the conditions of modern ethics and to reaffirm the values that were the foundations of the bourgeois civilization: democracy, job security and the respect of law.
Unsuccessfully.
While the Neoliberal wave, taking advantage of new technology-based lifestyles, was transforming cultural and political expectations, the Left has been defending the ethical rules of the past and the established political institutions. Driven to an inherently conservative position, the leftists lost their character and their identity.
Now, it is finally crystal clear: resistance is over. Capitalist absolutism will not be defeated
and democracy will never be reinstated.
That game is over.
***
Will the general intellect be permanently codified by the matrix and turned into a networked swarm, or will the general intellect be able to re-conjoin with its social body, and create the conditions for autonomy and independence from the matrix?
***
Who will be the primary actor in this process? The empathic net of autonomous organization of cognitive workers, or the matrix of bio-financial capitalism?
The alternative that may be envisioned for the future is therefore the following: submission of the mind to the rules of the global neuro-machine according to the competitive principle of the capitalist economy – or the disentanglement of the autonomous potency of the general intellect.
The process of transformation is shifting from the field of political decision-making to the conceptual and practical sphere of neuroplasticity. The brain mutation that is underway can be described as a spasmodic attempt to cope with the surrounding chaotic infosphere and to reframe the relation between infosphere and the brain. Social brain is obliged to cope with traumatic phenomena. Not only the psychic dimension of the unconscious is disturbed, but the fabric of the neural system itself is subjected to trauma, overload, disconnection. The adaptation of the brain to the new environment involves enormous suffering, a tempest of violence and madness.
My question is: does consciousness play a role in this process of mutation? Doesimagination consciously act on the neuro-plastic process? Can the conscious organism do
something when it is taken in a situation of spasm?
Imagination is the faculty that makes it possible to go beyond the limits of language, the ability to recompose the imaginary fragments (and also conceptual and linguistic fragments) that we collect from the experience of the past. Imagination draws fragments from the warehouse of our memory – which actually is not a warehouse, but a dynamic machine for re-elaboration. Then imagination redraws the borders and redesigns the forms, and this process of redesigning enables us to see a new horizon, and to project a world as-yet-unseen.
So, at the end of the day, why did I write such a horrible book? I did it because I am looking for an ethical method of withdrawal from the present barbarianism, and at the same time I want to find a way of interpreting the new ethical values that barbarianism is bringing about.
How can we remain human, how can we speak of solidarity, while abandoning the emptied and ineffective field of political action?
***
So what can be done when nothing can be done?
I think that ironic autonomy is the answer. I mean the contrary of participation, I mean the contrary of responsibility, I mean the contrary of faith. Politicians call on us to take part in their political concerns, economists call on us to be responsible, to work more, to go shopping, to stimulate the market. Priests call on us to have faith. If you follow these inveiglements to participate, to be responsible – you are trapped. Do not take part in the game, do not expect any solution from politics, do not be attached to things, do not hope.
Dystopian irony (dyst-irony) is the language of autonomy.
Be sceptical: do not believe your own assumptions and predictions (or mine).
And do not revoke revolution. Revolt against power is necessary even if we may not know how to win.
Do not belong. Distinguish your destiny from the destiny of those who want to belong and to participate and to pay their debt. If they want war, be a deserter. If they are enslaved but want you to suffer like them, do not give in to their blackmail.
If you have to choose between death and slavery, don’t be a slave. You have some chance to survive. If you accept slavery, you will die sooner or later anyway. As a slave.
You will die anyway; it is not particularly important when. What is important is how you live your life.
Remember that despair and joy are not incompatible. Despair is a consequence of understanding. Joy is a condition of the emotional mind. Despair is to acknowledge the truth of the present situation, but the sceptical mind knows that the only truth is shared imagination and shared projection. So do not be frightened by despair. It does not delimit the potential for joy. And joy is a condition for proving intellectual despair wrong.
Finally, don’t take me too seriously. Don’t take too seriously my catastrophic premonitions.
And in case it is difficult to follow these prescriptions, don’t take too seriously myprescriptions.
Irony is about the independence of mind from knowledge; it is about the excessive nature of the imagination.
So, at the very end: don’t believe (me).
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