An exploration on forming a definition for the heart/humanity, and notes on “The Soul At Work” by Franco “Bifo” Berardi.
If the heart is impure, contaminated by otherness, then what could it possibly signify? What means a story of connectedness when alienation is constant? It seems the story of the heart is ripe with problems, bordering religious. It needs to be made flexible!
But is some idea of essence, of humanity, necessary in order to prove the wrongness of exploitation? Humanity is in evolution and therefore remains undefined in it’s present moment. The recent steps we make are unsettled and barely noticeable while our technological development makes it seem our evolution is accelerating. When “humanity” is totally subjective, then a total submission to machine intelligence becomes possible. Is this evolution of humanity or something else?
Herbert Marcuse, a radical philosopher from Berlin wrote this in 1964: “The liberating force of technology – the instrumentalization of things – turns into a fetter of liberation; the instrumentalization of (hu)man.” I am fascinated by the idea of a fetter of liberation: I feel this is an essential point we need to make towards our techno-optimistic cultures. To fetter, to chain, to restrain…
Bifo connects this to our economic model: “The economy, like a general semiotic cage, forbids the development of the potential still existing in the material and intellectual structure of technology.” The incredible infastructrucal development of our technologies loses any potential of radical social liberation due to the economic model they depend on. While capital “diminishes labour time in the necessary form” it tends “to increase it in the superflous form.” Only through superflous labour activity can we value an excess of production.
So through semiotization, a capitalist realism perhaps, our technological development can only function under a specific system of value making, where it loses possibility of total social liberation. Partial social liberation is essential to foster an emotional dependence with new technology. This emotional dependence will supply the new value making system with endless energy (superflous activity). The heart is entangled with the machine. I don’t believe we will be satiated through further development, but it seems like an inevitable cycle of longing and curiousity. Perhaps the only hope is restriction of possibility due to the collapse of material infastructures and semiotic production that leaves a gap for new thinking and new constructions. I imagine this collapse is already occuring so we don’t need to accelerate destruction but start imagining and building our healthier societies together.
To make the heart spectral… if the heart is an active position towards our encounters, then it does not represent a lost human essence but rather an idea of our potential. An active position depends on what is around us, a way of being that evolves with the surroundings, not lost but unwritten, capable of being wrote collectively, and wrote again.
Knowledge production: Human knowledge is not revealing/excavating truth, it is instead a feedback between our active comprehension that reacts and acts into our encounters, being formed by and forming with our environment. “TRUTH” is transformed as it is discovered, meaning that knowledge is produced. Let’s imagine a vulnerable encounter, a proclomation to love! Imagining might transform what becomes possible.
