The changes taking place in our aesthetic and emotional sensibility: a
deep mutation in the psychosphere, caused by semio-capitalism.
Franco "Bifo" Berardi's newest book analyzes the contemporary changes
taking place in our aesthetic and emotional sensibility--changes the
author claims are the result of semio-capitalism's capturing of the
inner resources of the subjective process: our experience of time, our
sensibility, the way we relate to each other, and our ability to imagine
a future. Precarization and fractalization of labor have provoked a deep
mutation in the psychosphere, and this can be seen in the rise of
psychopathologies such as post-traumatic stress disorder, autism, panic,
and attention deficit disorder. Sketching out an aesthetic genealogy of
capitalist globalization, Berardi shows how we have arrived at a point
of such complexity in the semiotic flows of capital that we can no
longer process its excessive currents of information. A swarm effect now
rules: it has become impossible to say "no." Social behavior is trapped
in inescapable patterns of interaction coded by techno-linguistic
machines, smartphones, screens of every size, and all of these sensory
and emotional devices end up destroying our organism's sensibility by
submitting it to the stress of competition and acceleration.
Arguing for disentanglement rather than resistance, Berardi concludes by
evoking the myth of La Malinche, the daughter of a noble Aztec family.
It is a tale of a translator and traitor who betrayed her own people,
yet what the myth portends is the rebirth of the world from the collapse
of the old.
