Social entropy and recombination: Franco Bifo Beradi
The resurgent question of the
intellectuals hides the contemporary problem of "what is to be
done?", the problem of the auto-organisation of cognitive
labour.
Space has re-emerged for the question of
the intellectuals, in the discussion of the Italian left. But the question is
badly posed, and the word itself (intellectual) elaborates extremely badly the
contemporary socio-mental geography.
Lenin related to the figure of the
intellectual the problem of what to do, in the political direction of the
collective action. The intellectuals are not a social class, they do not have
specific social interests to sustain. They are generally the expression of
parasitical income, they can make "purely intellectual" choices,
making themselves out to be the means of revolutionary consciousness. In this
sense they are what is most similar to the pure becoming of the spirit, in the
Hegelian development of self-consciousness.
On the other hand, the workers whilst
being the bearers of a homogenous social interest, can not pass from the purely
economic state (the Hegelian in itself) to the politically conscious state (the
for itself of self consciousness) only through the political form of the party
which embodies and hands down the philosophical heritage (the proletariat as
heirs of classical German philosophy).
In Gramsci the reflection on the
intellectuals is more articulated, and it comes closer to a materialist
formulation of the organic character of the relation between the intellectual
and working class. However, the party is conceived in the entire communist
tradition as the as collective intellectual. The intellectual of the modern
tradition (who has not yet been put to work by the digital web) can only have
access to the collective dimension through the party.
The break produced by Italian Operaismo
(which I prefer to call composition, for the emphasis that is given to the
question of class composition) is founded on an abandonment of the Leninist
notion of the party as collective intellectual, and of the notion itself of
intellectuals that gets
substituted with that of the general
intellect (Marxian but neither Engelsian nor Leninist). It does not seems to me
that a satisfactory reflection on the overcoming of the Leninist notion of
party and of the Gramscian notion of intellectual has been accomplished.
If we want to define today a what is to be
done for our times, we must concentrate our attention on the relation between
the cognitive function of socially complex labour and movements that organise
forms of productive and communicative autonomy.
The book of Hardt and Negri (consciously)
lacks a theory of action, and this is not one of its limits. The notion of
'multitude' does not have, (IMHO) an
active and organising power, even less so
a 'subjectifying' function.
The notion of the multitude describes a dissolutionary tendency, the entropy that
is diffused in every social system, and which rends impossible ('asintotico',
infinite, interminable) the labour of power, but also the labour of political
organisation.
We need to individuate a recombinative
function, and this we find in the cognitive function that traverses all of
social production.
Intellectual work does not exist anymore
as a social function separate from total social labour, but becomes transversal
function, creation of techno-linguistic interfaces to which is given the
fluidity of a social process, and therefore recombinative power (where to
recombine does not mean to subvert, to overthrow, to authenticate and reveal,
but it signifies much more concretely to assemble elements of knowledge
according to a different design from that of profit and capital.
The answer to the present what is to be
done is political in a very particular sense. In fact it does not exist in the
creation of a party, of an organisation external to the social capable of
leading it or governing it. The answer consists in giving shape to the specific
knowledge practice according to autonomous epistemic models, according to
ethical epistemic models that interweave that specific level of knowledge.
The programmer must be a programmer, the doctor must be a doctor, the bio-engineer
must be a bio-engineer, and the architect must be an architect, whilst in the
Leninist view each one had to be a professional revolutionary, and this meant
to bring revolutionary consciousness to the worker from the outside.
But the
programmer, the engineer, the doctor and the architect must in the first place
reorient ate their own knowledge action., modifying the function and structure
of their own specific field of knowledge and their own specific field of
productive action.
It seems to me that we have put together a
great quantity of useful elements for the elaboration of a "manifesto of
knowledge workers (which should not
be called that)", but the hesitation
that frustrates us regards the method itself.
We don't want a manifesto "declared", because this reminds us too
much of Leninist voluntarism, a declaration that appeals to something external
to what is said.
We want, on the contrary, a manifesto that
is like software, or like a genetic code. A declaration that is paradigm, that
is contagious and at the same time a recombinative enunciative chain.
Have we exaggerated our expectations,
requirements and intentions? Perhaps yes, but its worth it because, the
intentions are not just intentions, in themselves, but dispositions to being.
Translated by Erik Empson and Arianna Bove, from the Italian on http://www.rekombinant.org/article.php?sid=1577