Mark Fisher and Green Gartside (2011)

Mark Fisher and Green Gartside talking music, politics, theory, public space...

Mark Fisher, Cybertime

Franco 'Bifo’ Berardi - ‘In the lonely cockpit of our lives’

 ‘In the lonely cockpit of our lives’—Franco 'Bifo’ Berardi on the Germanwings crash

It seems that the young pilot Andreas Lubitz who hurled himself and the airplane, packed with innocent people against the rocks of a mountain, concealed the medical certification of depressive pathology from his employer, Lufthansa. This is bad of course, but totally understandable: turbo-capitalism does not like workers who go on leave for health reasons and most of all it dislikes references to depression. 

Depressed, me? Don’t even mention it. I feel fine, I’m perfectly efficient, happy, dynamic, energetic, and most of all competitive. I go jogging every morning and I’m available for over time. It is the philosophy of the low cost airlines, you know? And the philosophy of the perfectly deregulated economy where everybody is demanded to give ceaselessly the best, in order to survive. 

After this suicidal mass murder air companies are invited to double-check the psychological conditions of the workers. Pilots should not be maniac, depressed, melancholic or panic-prone. And what about bus drivers and policemen, steel workers, and school teachers? Everybody will be subjected to psychological screening in order to detect and expel from the labor market those who suffer from depression.  

Good idea indeed, except that the absolute majority of the contemporary population should be put on leave. It’s easy to target those who are officially labeled as psychopaths, but what of all those people who suffer from unhappiness, try to keep calm but might fly into a rage in dangerous situations? Hard to distinguish between unhappiness and looming aggressive depression, and the proportion of people who suffer from despair is growing and growing. The frequency of psychopathology has been on the rise in the last few decades, and according to the World Health Organisation, the suicide rate has increased by 60% in the last four decades, and is dangerously high among the youngsters.

What in the last four decades has been pushing people to run and willingly embrace the black dog? There is a relationship between this incredible surge in suicidal propensity, and the triumph of neoliberal coercion to compete. And also between the spread of psychic frailty and the loneliness of a generation that is meeting people only through a connected screen. 

For every person who succeeds in committing suicide there are twenty people who unsuccessfully try to kill themselves. We must acknowledge that a sort of epidemic of suicide is underway on the planet earth.

Here possibly lies the deep explication of some appalling phenomena of our time that we tend to read in political terms, but cannot be fully realised through the political lens. Contemporary terrorism should be interpreted first of all as the spreading of a penchant for self-suppression. I know that the shaheed (suicidal terrorist) is apparently acting for political, ideological or religious motivations. But this is only the rhetorical surface. The inmost motivation of suicide is always despair, humiliation and misery. He or she who decide to destroy their own life is someone who is experiencing life as an unbearable load, and sees death as the only way out, and in murder the only vengeance against those who have deceived, humiliated and insulted her/him.

The most likely cause of the surge in suicide and particularly in murderous suicide is the transformation of social life into a factory of unhappiness of which it appears impossible to escape. The decree to be a winner, compared with the consciousness that winning is impossible, means that the only way to win (at least for a moment) is destroying other’s lives then committing suicide. 

Andreas Lubitz has sealed himself in that gory cockpit because his suffering was intolerable to him, and because he blamed his colleagues and the passengers and all the human beings of the planet as guilty of his suffering. He did what he did because he could not get rid of the unhappiness that has been devouring contemporary mankind since advertising began bombing the social brain with mandatory cheerfulness, and digital loneliness has been multiplying the nervous stimulation and encasing the bodies in the cage of the screen, and financial capitalism has been forcing everybody to work more and more time for the miserable salary of precariousness.

On Capital Absolutism, Bio-Semiocapiltalism & Cognitive Workers

An epidemic of unhappiness is spreading across the planet, while capital absolutism is asserting its right to unfettered control of our lives. A bio-semiocapitalism infiltrates the nervous cells of conscious sensible organisms, it inoculates in them a thanato-political rationale, a morbid sentiment which is progressively taking hold of the collective unconscious, culture and sensibility. The biopolitical effect of semiocapitalism ( better said: thanatological effect of semiocapitalism) is essentially the capture of cognitive activity, and the subjection of the faculty of expression of the linguistic animal to the sleepless, aggressive dynamics of the labour market.

Language is captured by the networked machine and turned into an essentially productive activity. Herein lies the trap: people are encouraged to consider their linguistic competence as factors of economic competition, and to manage and invest in them as such. Creativity, expressiveness, affection, emotion - the human soul, in other words - are considered to be productive factors and consequently, they are evaluated according to standards of productivity. Exploitation, competition, precariousness, redundancy are not perceived as the effects of a conflictual social relationship, but internalised as deficiencies of the self, as personal inadequacies. The unceasing restructuring of the organisation of work is perceived as humiliation and brutality.

Only NON_INVOLVEMENT and the ability to remain extraneous, to refuse any identification with one's job and with one's working condition, only a radical rejection of the ethics of responsibility, might offer works the possibility of navigating a way out from this productivity blackmail.

Unfortunately, the ethics of responsibility, the phoney discourse on participation and collaboration, are prevailing in today's political and cultural life. We invest our psychic energies and our expectations into work because our intellectual and affective life is poor, because we are depressed, anxious and insecure. So we are trapped. The industrial worker who was obliged to repeat the same gesture a thousand times every day had no reason to identify with her work - so she invested her psychological energies into solidarity with colleagues, and her mind was free to hate the assenbly line, and to entertain thoughts that had nothing to do with her daily slavery. Conversely, cognitive works have been lured into the trap of creativity: their expectations are submitted to the productivity blackmail because they are obliged to identify their soul (the linguistic and emotional core of their activity) with their work. Social conflicts and dissatisfaction are perceived as psychological failures whose effect us the destruction of self-esteem.

For cognitive workers, particularly in conditions of precariousness, solidarity is rare. Everyone feels alone, pushed to complete at the mercy of precariousness.

Franco Bifo Berardi - extract from Heroes: Mass Murder & Sucide (Verso 2015)