The ‘graduate without a future’
An edition of the Novara radio show looking at the theme of the ‘graduate without a future’ with James Butler @piercepenniless and Aaron Peters @aaronjohnpeters. While broad-ranging the parameters of the discussion will include this piece by Paul Mason, economics editor of BBC Newsnight, and this response by Butler.
What does the future look like? Is there a future for the university and will it change? Has it changed? What is the relationship between education and the social democratic compromise now in free fall which permitted unprecedented numbers of people access to university and other social goods, and, the very category of the future itself?
Lifeboat communism – A review of Franco 'Bifo' Berardi’s After the future
Ben Lear's review of Franco 'Bifo' Berardi's book After the Future. Originally published in Viewpoint Magazine on 18th May 2012.
“Young people will have to get used to the idea of not having a fixed job for life... what monotony! It is much nicer to change and accept new challenges.”
– Mario Monti, Italian Prime Minister
“The Future is already here; It’s just unevenly distributed.”
– William Gibson
I
Review of The Soul at Work by Franco Berardi
Submitted by Nate on Jun 27 2012 05:21
Book review about Franco Berardi's The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy
In the discussion on a blog post that Joseph Kay wrote the conversation turned briefly to 'class composition'. This is a term used by some people in the Italian New Left, particularly a current called 'operaismo'.
Bifo Says Relax - Malcolm Harris
Malcolm Harris contests the viability of Berardi's conception of "slowing down" to defeat capitalism.
Of the anti-capitalist scholars and intellectuals who prescribe a political program, Franco Berardi might have the most counter-intuitive ideas. In his many articles, books, and lectures, Berardi pushes a curious line against a mind-warping market culture.
Radio Alice
Submitted by wojtek on Jan 4 2012 23:01
An interview with Franco Berardi on Radio Alice, a free radio station in Bologna from 1973-1977.
Radio Alice was a free radio station in Bologna from 1973-1977. Rather than attempting to objectify events in the world, they set out to create a flow of sounds, information, messages and poetry, silences and abuse. Like the manifestations of Dada, transmissions were seen as immediate cultural subversions.
On the brink of disaster
Franco 'Bifo' Berardi's essay from Feb 2003, in response to mass anti-war demonstrations, argues that a society that has rebelled and seceded from war must also secede from capitalism.
Let’s take a snapshot of the situation before everything precipitates; let’s simply try to remind ourselves what has happened in the world during the preparatory period of a conflict with unpredictable consequences; let’s delineate scenarios of likely developments and imagine possibilities to act: let’s build a strategy for the aftermath of the war.
The last novel of the twentieth century
An excerpt from a long review of "Q" by Luther Blisset, written by Franco "Bifo" Berardi and published on Derive Approdi #19, Rome, Springtime 2000
In Thomas Pynchon's Vineland we already experienced this feeling - of being in a post-historical time-space where nothing happens anymore, nothing but an absurd hanging on along the past's edge. A daughter (Prayrie) reconstructs an indecipherable past from the fragments and rags left behind by her parents' generation. That past is indecipherable because Zoyd and Frenesi (i.e.
Biopolitics and connective mutation
From Culture Machine Vol. 7, 2005. Italian Autonomist Franco 'Bifo' Berardi discusses biopolitics and digital social communication.
It is thanks to Michel Foucault that the theme of subjectivity has definitively been freed from its Hegelian and historicist legacy, and thought again in a new context -- that of biopolitical discipline. The subject does not pre-exist history, it does not preexist the social process. Neither does it precede the power formations or the political subjectivation that founds autonomy.
Can comment on articles and discussions