The European Crisis & the Global Collapse of Financial Capitalism - Franco 'Bifo' Berardi

The European Crisis & the Global Collapse of Financial Capitalism asks: What future can we imagine? What will be the place of artists and cultural workers?



In the sphere of semio-capital, if you want to increase productivity, you have to accelerate the info-sphere, the environment where information is circulating. What happens then to the social mind? Mental elaboration needs time. Emotional elaboration of information takes time.



Think of attention. Attention is the activation of physical reactions in the brain, and also of emotional, affective reactions. Attention cannot be infinitely accelerated.



This is why semiocapital is provoking psychopathology in the sphere of attention and in the sphere of sensibility and emotional intelligence. The problem of subjectivation and of autonomy has to be redefined starting from this new mindscape. Aesthetics, Psychotherapy and activism have to be linked in this new sphere.



Franco 'Bifo' Berardi is a writer, media-theorist and media-activist. He founded the magazine A/traverso and was part of the staff of Radio Alice, the first free pirate radio station in Italy; he is also co-founder of the e-zine recombinant.org and of the telestreet network. Like other intellectuals involved in the political movement of Autonomia in Italy during the 1970's, he fled to Paris, where he worked with Felix Guattari in the field of schizoanalysis. He has contributed to various magazines including Semiotexte (New York), Chimeres (Paris) and is a regular contributor to the monthly ALFABETA2 (Rome). Berardi is the author of several publications including his last book The Soul at Work (Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 2009).



He is currently teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, and is working on the project SCEPSI (European School for Social Imagination).