File:Lapo Berti Accelerated Fantasies.pdf

Lapo Berti :: Accelerated Fantasies (Rizosfera/The Strong of the Future, SF007.eng, 2017)

Sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, the figure standing out in the background of Srnicek and Williams’ «Manifesto for an Accele-rationist Politics» shapes. After its reading the Ur-Staat shyly pipes out from the pages of the «Manifesto», a text that may be classified as speculative «sci-fi Marxism», where we sense an unmistakable scent of antique (more «steam-Marx» than «cyber-Marx»). Allende’s Chilean “Cybersyn” experience or Slava Gerovitch’s “Soviet-computing” references are not enough to pick up the thread which links socialist experimentation, economic program and Marxist ideology, sharply stopped in the 1970’s. It is in fact the primordial State, or as Deleuze and Guattari used to define it, the primordial despotic State which rises itself as an institution, as a means to manage the hidden powers in the relationship among socialism, technology, computational calculation and ideology.“Of all the institutions, [The Ur-staat] is perhaps the only one to appear fully armed in the brain of those who institute it”. The myth of the primordial State as a mediator of the political conflict between classes in the light of an accelerationist and Marxist reading, matches with that “characteristically intense energy” emanating from another original myth: Prometheism as an expression of blind faith in a positive, noble and forward-looking technique. Therefore Srnicek and Williams are to be placed paradoxically more in the dystopian science-fiction “steampunk” area (backward looking at the relationship between social progress and technology - what if the USSR had invented the Internet and given the personal computer to the masses?) than in the “cyberpunk” one. «Communism is Lenin - according to me» Mario Tronti recently said. Equally the «Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics» displays a peculiar hi-tech version of Leninism, thus positioning Srnicek and Williams’s text in the dominant XX century «collective worker» thought of the Left.In the revised and modernized socialism of XXI century, as suggested by Srnicek e Williams, socialising the heavy industry is not politically productive, whereas the IT sector is. The new beast to tame is the cognitive capitalism of the «digital platforms». To the classic Hegel-Marx binomy of «capital and work», the two young intellectuals propose «robo-post-capitalism and freedom from work», while the State continues to represent an artificial en-tity subjugated to the new virtual circuiting of a digital mobility, enhanced to travel-philosophy. According to Srnicek and Williams, it is the capital in its objectivity to produce conflict over and over, whereas new subjectivities and singularities fade in the horizon of the events. Lapo Berti has been one of the first in Italy to express doubts on Sr-nicek e Williams’s text and on their «postcapitalist planning» tesis. From his heretic post-operaist observatory Lapo Berti denounces in his «Accele-rated Fantasies» some of the basic ideas of the manifesto, being the most interesting one the «constructionist fallacy» as an example of total faith in the compositional ability of a hi-tech socialist project. To be able to shape society according to one’s ideals as pointed out by «sacred texts», still repre-sents the forbidden and Faustian dream on which «any communist project historically collapses». According to Berti, communism has been - and still is - a secularised, historized process, «discontinued goods» in Tronti’s words. Here lies the point of contact between the deleuzian-foucauldian-nietzsche-an «abstract accelerationist line» of the Strong of the Future and Berti’s thought. In view of the heterogeneity of the systems and powers overlapping our society today, it is no longer possible to oppose the simple speculative and abstract text of a totalizing theory, were it Srnicek and Williams’ s neo-mar-xist one.The irregular, transcendent «social metabolism» often recalled by Berti cannot be driven by a superior project, if that is the case an inevitable return to absolutism and spiritualization of the Ur-Staat will take place. Moreover in his «Accelerated Fantasies», Berti declares the death of any «revolutionary vanguard» and of its braking triangular thought in the foreground, a thought that locates progressive trajectories where some illuminated and competent groups fulfill strategic roles of synthesis and behind which the tamed masses should rise up following an insufflating order. Supporting the «death certificate» of the revolution as an «unexpected jump» pampered by political agitprop groups and promoting the revolution as an «accelerated process of singularization» we close quoting the words of another heretic thinker of the Italian Left, Gianni Celati, in one of his interviews, signifi-cantly entitled “Against the avant-garde”: «In these new literary or visual avant-garde, a false alternative is always at stake: to be up ahead or to be beyond, to be smarter or to be naive. The smarter ones are those who have seen more, understood more and know the new line of breach. The naive ones are those who believe in a line which the smarter ones have already understood it won’t work. According to me if the distinctive fact of the avant garde is this false alternative - meant as «excessive hegelism», (the negative, the critique, etc.) - then all this world is finished, especially after the development of the counterculture and the flourishing of the Pop Art. There is no longer an issue of infinite progression but of intensities, of lines of joy, cultural expressions that have nothing in common with the critique. What has finished then is the critique itself, the idea of substituting a theory with a supposed «better one», instead of intercepting movements, motions, social earthquakes, points of flight and new solutions.»