The sentence that better captures the methodology of Marxian philosophy, is the well know eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”
This sentence may be understood in two different ways: the philosopher must understand the world, interpret it, because this is the only way to change. But also: the philosopher must take part in the process of changing the world because this is the only to really understand it.
Let’s hypothesize that our understanding leads us to the conclusion that to change the world is impossible, because of its complexity and of the irreversibility of the prevailing trends. In this case the error would be the only way to act.
In July 2009 we decided to end the Rekombinant project, started in 2000.
The project Rekombinant, a weblog connecting almost two thousands persons all over Europe – large part of them Italian researchers working abroad – was based on the idea that the actual process of intellectual labor may become an autonomous process of self organization of knowledge, technology and social production.
At the end of the XX century the digitalization of global production materialized the Marxian concept of general intellect.
Assuming that social emancipation and autonomy of knowledge and technology tend to coincide in the sphere of the general intellect, Rekombinant was intended to give the cognitive labor a platform for sharing social consciousness and techno-scientific knowledge.
But the history of the zero decade began with a dark reversal: identitarian fanaticism and economic dogmatism took the lead in the West and elsewhere. The shattering of the general intellect was the prevailing trend of the past decade: war, militarization of knowledge, precarization of labor, and fragmentation of the cognitive process.
Industrial labor has been under attack during the last thirty years. The effects of this attack are now crystal clear: a huge increase in productivity, and a parallel decrease in the average salary worldwide. The total amount of necessary labor time is falling, and is destined to fall more and more, as a consequence of two factors: the application of intelligent technology and the flexible organization of labor subsuming every cell of social life in a flow of time at disposal of capital. The working hours per person are not decreasing, but increasing, and this is generating unemployment, underemployment and marginalization. The mother of all the bubbles, the labor bubble is growing and growing.
The only way to counteract this tendency would be a cut in working hours per person. But the workers movement did not understand the crucial importance of reducing the individual amount of working time. So the work bubble has grown and grown, and the paradox of jobless expansion has become the norm.
Economic globalization and cultural identitarianism, in their contradictory convergence, have destroyed the consciousness of the common interest of workers, while the precarization of cognitive labor and the depletion of the cognitive workers have weakened the possibility of worker’s autonomy. Today at the beginning of the second decade, we cannot predict any process of recomposition of social labor, and we cannot predict any process of self organization of the cognitariat. Instead we are facing a simultaneous increase in unemployment and in exploitation, impoverishment of daily life of the population, collapse of the social infrastructures, identitarian violence, and a general decay of the modern social civilization. Global capitalism has divorced from Modernity, and in the span of three decades the legacy of Humanism, Democracy and Social Welfare has been squandered. Now de-civilization is on its way, and no conscious collective resistance is in sight.
So, what is the point of radical thought, what’s the point of critique engagement, if no conscious collective subjectivation is possible, and no way is left for hijacking the criminal train of capitalism?
What possibility is supporting hope and dissidence and revolt?
The only possibility is in the limits of our knowledge and understanding.
Tertulliano said “Credo quia absurdum” (I believe because it is absurd) in order to establish his faith in God. I’m not speaking of faith, here. I’m rather speaking of the contrary, the obstinate refusal of believing in the reality of our daily experience.
The only possibility of reinventing a future is based on the assumption that we are in error.
To err means exactly this: to wander in the infinite sphere of the excess of possibilities that our present stance makes invisible. To roam in the infinite sphere of excess that is irreducible to knowledge and predictability.
My knowledge and my understanding show no room for solidarity in the coming time, given the present conditions techno-totalitarianism. But the catastrophe is exactly (etymology: kata and strophein) the point where a new landscape is going to be revealed.
I do not see that landscape because my knowledge and my understanding are limited, and the limits of my language are the limits of my world.
My knowledge and understanding are missing the event, the singularity.
So I must act “as if”. As if the forces of labor and knowledge may overcome the forces of greed and of proprietary obsession. As if the cognitive workers may overcome the fractalization of their life and intelligence, and give birth to a process of self-organization of collective knowledge. I must resist simply because I cannot know what is happening after the future, and I must preserve the consciousness and sensibility of social solidarity, of human empathy, of gratuitous activity, of freedom, equality and fraternity. Just in case, right?
Just because we don’t know what is going to happening next, in the empty space that comes after the future of modernity. I must resist because this is the only way to be in peace with my self. In the name of self-love, we must resist. And self-love is the basic ethic rule that an anarchist prizes.
The present ignorance has to be seen as a space of possibility. Error is action in this space of ignorance. We have to start from the error of the general intellect.
The force of the collective intelligence is boundless. Theoretically. But it lacks any consciousness of itself. Intelligence without self-consciousness.
I am talking of the self-consciousness of the general intellect, millions and millions of people worldwide producing the info-flow that makes the planet go round.
Creating a form of self-consciousness of the general intellect is the political task of the future. And it is not only political, but philosophical, epistemological, and in the end therapeutic.
Why the cognitarians are weak, and disunited, and unable to assert their right as laborers, and their knowledge as researchers? Because they live in a dimidiated form, because their brain is detached from their body, because their communication is less and less communicating, more and more freezing sensitive life.
The new space of activism is here, in the connection of poetry and therapy and paradigmatic creation. The error is the gate to this space.
Poetry and therapy (thera-poetry) will be the forces leading to the creation of a cognitarian self-consciousness: not a political party, no organization of interests, but the reactivation of the cognitarian sensibility.
The error of the general intellect is the starting point, after the future.
