Food for thought that need to be supported

It's from e-flux, Hyper-Semiotization and De-Sexualization of Desire: On Félix Guattari by Franco "Bifo" Berardi

The Swimming Hole, Thomas Eakins, 1884-85. Oil on canvas.

Guatari and Autonomy (Autonomia)

In 1974, I was in compulsory military service and lived in an Italian military camp. But military life isn't for me. I'm looking for a way out. A friend suggested I read a French philosopher. So I started reading Felix Guatari.

I started with his Psychoanalyticals and Transversity and got inspiration from his work. The colonel at the mental hospital thought I was crazy. They sent me home. From that moment on, I thought Guataly was a friend, and his work pointed to an escape path. (suggest Paths of escape from any type of bars, physical or otherwise.)

I continued these studies throughout the 1970s, when Autonomia, a movement of students and young workers, emerged from universities, factories and occupations. The campaign is expressed through many different types of actions and organizations, including anti-cultural and aesthetic projects. In 1975, I published the first issue of A/traverso, a magazine that tried to translate the concept of " schizophrenic analysis " into autonomous languages. Then, in 1976, I and a group of friends launched the first free Italian radio station, Radio Alice. Eventually, the police shut down the radio station and accused us of organizing a riot following the assassination of Francesco Lorosso, a militant of the extra-parliamentary group Lotta Continua.

In order to define itself, the Bologna Movement in 1977 chose the slogan " Desiring for autonomy ". Sometimes the term "we, transversalists." In public statements, the reference to post-structuralism is clear in the leaflets, in the slogan of the 1997 spring demonstrations, in the face of State violence and mass repression.

We read Anti-Oldips, but we don't understand it. However, there's a word that strikes us: desire. It is clear to us that the driving force of the process of Jucheization is desire. In other words, we propose: let us stop thinking about the " subject " and let us forget Hegel (or spit on him, as in the title of Kara-Lonzi 1970). In other words, subjectivity is not something that is readily available in our simple organization. In other words, subjectivity is not something ready-made that we have to simply organize. We came to see that there are no subjects, but rather streams of pure moving organs that are at the same time biological, social, and sexual-and critical of course. The existence of consciousness depends on unwitting and continuous work, and on the laboratory - not a theatre where people are performing a tragedy that has been written, but a tragedy that has been crossed by the flow of desire, which people keep writing and rewriting.

Moreover, the concept of desire should not be reduced to a constant positive tension: Desire is the key to explaining the waves of social solidarity and offensive waves, the eruption of anger and the hardening of identity. Revolucionary liberal movements and repressive reactions to them are rooted in the volatility of desire.

Finally, desire is not a happy good child. On the contrary, it can strangulate, and it can return to itself, with violent, destructive and barbaric effects. Desire is a factor in the intensity of relationships with others. Intensities can go in different directions, even in contradictory ways.

The phrase retournelles (refrains) was created in Guataly to define a symbolic link that can be reconciled with the wider environment. Refrains is a vibration whose strength can be linked to this or that symbol and nervous irritation system. Desires are perceptions of refrains, and we create refrains to capture the stimuli from each other (one body, one word, one image, one scenario) and then connect to them. Similarly, wasps and orchids are two entities that have nothing to do with each other, but can be connected, shared/enjoyed with each other and have a beneficial impact on the other. Desire is not a natural fact, but rather a force of change based on anthropological, technological and social conditions.

Reconstruction of desire

In our age of neoliberalism and digital acceleration, we must reconsider our desires. We must also reconsider desire in the context of contemporary identity movements.

Neoliberal economics has accelerated the pace of labour exploitation, in particular cognitive labor; cogntive digital technology has accelerated the flow of information, thus reinforcing the rhythm of symbolic stimulism and neurostimulation. This double acceleration is both the origin and the cause of increased labour productivity, which in turn has led to unprecedented increases in capital accumulation. But it is also the reason for overexploitation of human organisms, especially the brain. Our task today is to determine the impact of this overexploitation on the psychological balance and sensitivity of human beings - as a human being, but above all as a collective.

We must reflect on the variation of desires after the trauma of the pandemic. The virus may be less visible, the infection may be contained to some extent, but the trauma will not disappear overnight; it continues to do its work, in part as a result of its sensitivity to the body of others, their skin, a collective phobia of their lips.

Over the past two decades, studies have shown that sexual behaviour is undergoing profound changes, and recent viral shocks have only reinforced this trend, rooted in technological anthropological changes dating back at least 30 years. For example, in the book IGen of 2017, Jean Twenge analysed the relationship between bridging technologies and changes in the psychological and emotional behaviour of generations formed in a technological cognitive environment. After such research, it turns out that people born since the beginning of the century have learned more words from machines than they have learned from people.

In my view, this definition is useful for understanding the depth of the changes that are taking place. Freud introduced the concept that language acquisition cannot be understood without thinking about emotional dimensions. We should also remember George-Aganbourne's statement in "Language and Death" that voices are the intersection of body and meaning, body and symbol. In addition, the Italian feminist philosopher Luisa Muraro confirmed that the understanding of the meaning of words was linked to the emotional confidence of mothers.

I believe in a word because my mother told me so. More broadly, I believe that the world is meaningful, because my mother told me that words symbolize the world. The psychological basis of attribution is based on this primitive emotional sharing behaviour, which evolves through a single vibration supported by a voice, a body, a sensitivity.

So what happens when the voice of the mother (or anyone else) is replaced by a machine? The meaning of the world has been replaced by the function of symbols, which allow us to produce operational results from the receipt and interpretation of symbols that lack emotional depth, and therefore there is no guarantee of intimacy. The concept of instability has its full psychological and cognitive significance here, namely, that relations with the world are weakened and ineffective. In question here is the expensive intimacy of independence, and desire in its (non-exhaustive) settlement with eroticism.

Desire and sex.

Usually, we link desire to body, to sex, to one body close to another. But we must stress that the realm of desire cannot be reduced to the dimensions of its nature, even if such an indication is reflected in history, anthropology and psychoanalysis. Desire is not simply associated with sexuality, but we can also envisage a sexual act without desire.

In the concept of desire (and reality) there is more than sex, as Freud's concept of "uplifting " tells us, it involves indirect investment in desire itself.

The pandemic has completed the de-escalation of desire, a process that has been going on for a long time, as long as the exchange of conscious and conscious bodies in physical space is replaced by exchanges without signs of body stimulation. If the dematerialization of this communication does not erase the desire, it moves it to a purely symbolic (or super-numerical) level. Desire then moves in the direction of degeneration or lateralization, and it now manifests itself in an isolated situation where the epidemic has been normalized and almost institutionalized. Psychological, psychoanalytic theory and practice, as well as political practice, are called into question because the underlying subject matter has been disrupted and changed irreversibly.

An Italian psychoanalyst, Luigi Zoja, published a book on the depletion (and preference disappearance) of desires; in fact, the title of the book is Decline of Desires (Il declino del desiderio). The book is full of very interesting data on the dramatic decline in the frequency of sexual contact between people today and, generally speaking, the time spent on physical contact. But the core assumption of the book, namely, the disappearance of desire, seems to me questionable. In my view, what is doomed to disappear is not the desire itself, but the sexualized expression of desire. The symmetrics of contemporary emotions are increasingly manifested in a sharp decline in psychological easing resulting from contact, pleasure and touch. This is consistent with the loss of sensory trust and the sense of deep complicity that makes social life intolerable: The pleasure of knowing someone's skin through sensory touch, the sweet pleasure of seeing!

Perversion of desire and contemporary aggression

Desexualization of desire has the real potential to transform it into a hell of loneliness and suffering, just waiting to be able to express itself in one way or another. Unutilized violence is increasingly targeting innocent people in the form of armed and murder - the wave of killings has multiplied everywhere since the Columbine events of 1999, with the United States as the main stage - only at the tip of the iceberg, which has disrupted world history at the political level. How can a person like Donald Trump or Jail-Bolsonaro, who is chosen by half of the people of North America or Brazil, if not a manifestation of despair and self- contempt? The election of a person who openly expresses racist and even criminal statements is profoundly similar (psychologically but also politically) to killings that can only be explained by the desire to commit suicide.

Kurt Wimmer, Equilibrium, 2002. Film still. In an oppressive future where all forms of feeling are illegal, a man in charge of enforcing the law rises to overthrow the system and state.

What we are talking about today, fascism, must be interpreted in more than just political terms. Politics is just the spectacular terrain of these movements. While there are words very close to past fascism, contemporary right-wing movements have no rational content.

Only the discourse of humiliation, loneliness and despair can explain this worldwide phenomenon.

Those who are sarcasticly defined as members of the last generation (Z), who learn more words from machines than from real human beings, have grown up in an environment that is becoming less and less viable and pathological, both physically (pollution) and psychologically. This generation of exchanges is almost exclusively carried out in a technology immersion environment, where consistency is purely symbolic. Extinction is present as a technology -- experience of immersion simulation. Media production is increasingly saturated by such signs of despair. These signs serve as an alarming signal, but also as a contributing factor to the spread of pathology. I'm thinking of movies like Joker, parasite, squid games, and so many other similar products.

The viral trauma of the Covid pandemic has only multiplied the super-symbolization of the environment, but the technical and cultural conditions for this phenomenon already exist.

A mutation is reshaping desire: it is increasingly expressed in sexual terms, but in symbolic form. Desire does not stop being a driving force in the process of groupization; however, the process of subjectisation takes the form of anxiety, self-harm, or sometimes aggression, because desire is perverted as a pure illusion.

Democratization of desire, with its ubiquitous traces, translates at the social level into the historicalization of motivations for collective action. We are witnessing a large-scale disengagement: the majority have abandoned traditional politics, given up fertility and given up work. This phenomenon must be the subject of theoretical analysis (diagnostics) and must lead to the creation of strategies for collective psycho-political action (therapeutics).

This is my editorial record of the contribution of Felix Guattari to the commemorative conference held in Paris in October 2022, which coincided with the thirtieth anniversary of the death of the author of Chaosmose.

Translation: DEEPL

This post is part of our special coverage Syria Protests 2011.