Uniting Cognitarians is like Herding Cats!
It’s Thanksgiving 2017 and I’m still here. Haven’t blogged since mid-summer, primarily because I’ve been writing a new Shaping San Francisco guide book to San Francisco that will hopefully come out next autumn with City Lights Books (and maybe Pluto Press too). I’ve also been teaching a class on “Work and the City” at USF to a delightful half dozen grad students who have hungrily devoured the reading and come in every week ready for an interesting discussion (quite a new experience compared to previous teaching gigs). The weekly excursion through labor history and the contemporary politics of work, economy, and urban life has been refreshing for me, reconnecting me with decades of my own passions and long intellectual work (yes, I had them read, among many other things, various Processed World articles as well as the first few chapters of Nowtopia!).
Our weekly classes have provoked a lot of thought for me, as have the ongoing Public Talks at Shaping San Francisco, as well as the half dozen tours and lectures I’ve given this past few months. Trying to make sense of this strange time in history is not easy. The harsh dystopic reality of the Trump administration’s bulldozing approach to facts, compassion, and common sense is a daily affront. But it’s all too easy to fall prey to the Distraction Machine that got us here in the first place, and to lose the ability to look at the bigger picture. Whatever the frantic machinations of the venal kleptocrats around Trump, or the self-serving millionaires who sit in the Congressional majority, there are deeper changes afoot. These changes are global in nature, not limited to the U.S. and its endless self-importance, a national narcissism that grows ever more consuming as the actual power of the country and the culture tips into permanent and inevitable decline.
As I like to do with this blog, I’m going to talk about four books I recently read that complement each other quite well, and offer some compelling insights into this elusive bigger picture. The different authors have different purposes in their works, so they don’t necessarily line up tidily into one discussion, but their overlaps are part of what made me want to finish them before finally taking up this blog again. From darkly pessimistic to perhaps overly hopeful, taken together I think they help frame some of the questions we should be looking at beyond the ebb and flow of daily scandals and predictable barbarisms. The four books are Ellen Ullman’s Life in Code (and I should say that she spoke at our Talks series in October and you can check it out here); Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility; Zeynep Tufekci’s Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest; and the latest from Michael Hardt and Toni Negri, Assembly.
Clearly we are on the edge of something new and different, culturally and economically. Nearly everyone is in a state of worried waiting, anticipating various outcomes with their eyes firmly set on the rear-view mirror—are we going to become a full-blown fascist dictatorship? Will we turn away from authoritarian buffoonery and embrace a new New Deal? What else can we imagine going forward, especially given the rapidly changing methods we collectively use globally to produce the basics of life? Will robots and Artificial Intelligence combine to become our new Overlords or will we wrest control of technology and begin radically changing how we work and what we do? And what about the collapse of the planetary ecosphere? Is that now inevitable or can we still avert complete catastrophe through clever adaptation and vigorous reorganization and repurposing of our daily activities? Obviously a lot of these problems are connected!
In Assembly Hardt and Negri cite Carlo Vercellone for extending Marx’s periodization to
the cusp of the twenty-first century, when capital’s center of gravity shifts from large-scale industry to the phase of “general intellect,” that is, production based in increasingly intense and widespread circuits of social cooperation as well as machinic algorhithms as the basis to extract value from the production and reproduction of social life, a phase in which the distinction between the economic and the social is becoming increasingly blurred. (p. 41)
Similarly, Bifo is also rooted in a Marxist sensibility that sees our current era as defined fundamentally by the possibility of transcending the capitalist control of time and space: “The possibility of emancipation of social time from the obligation of salaried work still exists: it is located in the cooperative knowledge of millions of cognitive workers,” (p. 21) but unlike Hardt and Negri’s relative optimism, Bifo has written his book to analyze the blockages and limits that are preventing the cohort of “cognitive workers” from moving forcefully towards self-emancipation. “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.” (p. 51)
Bifo’s Futurability whipsaws back and forth between his conviction that no social subject exists at this time with the self-consciousness or political agency to pursue emancipation, and his invocation of the possibilities we face:
it is a tendency towards full deployment of the general intellect, the possibility of an emancipation of technology from the semiotic context of capitalism, the liberation of time from salaried work, the revitalization of collective life, and the expansion of care, cultural education and research: a post-labourist future. … The task of free thought is to enable freedom, and freedom means autonomy from the blackmail of realism that forgets the inscribed possibility and only sees the forms of power currently deployed. (p 64)