After the Future by Berardi Franco Bifo

Author:Berardi, Franco Bifo [Berardi, Franco Bifo]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781849350600
Publisher: AK Press
Published: 2011-09-20T07:00:00+00:00

CITY OF PANIC

The urban territory is increasingly traversed by streams of diasporic, heterogeneous, and deterritorialized imaginaries. Panic tends to become the urban psychic dimension. It is the reaction of a sensitive organism subjected to stimulation that is too strong and too rapid. The reaction of an organism urged on by impulses too frequent and intense to be emotively and conversationally elaborated.

What is panic? We are told that psychiatrists recently discovered and named a new kind of disorder—they call it “Panic Disorder.” It seems that it’s something quite recent in the psychological self-perception of human beings. But what does panic mean? “Panic” used to be a nice word, and this is the sense in which the Swiss-American psychoanalyst James Hillman remembers it in his book on Pan. Pan was the god of nature and totality. In Greek mythology, Pan was the symbol of the relationship between man and nature. Nature is the overwhelming flow of reality, things, and information that surrounds us. Modern culture is based on the idea of human domination, which is the domestication of nature. So the original panic feeling (which was something positive to the ancient world) is becoming increasingly terrifying and destructive. Today, panic has become a form of psychopathology: we can speak of panic when we see a conscious organism (individual or social) overwhelmed by the speed of processes in which it is involved, and where it has insufficient time to handle the information generated by those processes.

Technological transformations have displaced the economic process from the sphere of the production of material goods toward the sphere of semiotic goods. With this, semiocapital becomes the dominant form of the economy. The accelerated creation of surplus value depends on the acceleration of the infosphere. The digitalization of the infosphere opens the way for this kind of acceleration. Signs are produced and circulated at a growing speed, but the human terminal of the system (the embodied mind) is put under growing pressure and finally cracks. I think that the current economic crisis has something to do with this imbalance between the fields of semioproduction and semiodemand. This imbalance between the supply of semiotic goods and the socially available time of attention is the core of the economic crisis as well as the core of the intellectual and the political crises we are living through now.

Semiocapital is in a crisis of overproduction, but the form of this crisis is not only economic, but also psychopathic. Semiocapital, in fact, is not about the production of material goods, but about the production of psychic stimulation. The mental environment is saturated by signs that create a sort of continuous excitation, a permanent electrocution, which leads the individual, as well as the collective mind, to a state of collapse.

The problem of panic is generally associated with the management of time. But we can also see a spatial side to panic. During past centuries, the building of the modern urban environment used to be dependent on the rationalist plan of the political city. The economic dictatorship of the last few decades has accelerated urban expansion.

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