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Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-Alpha Generation

Franco Bifo Berardi,

Stevphen Shukaitis (Goodreads Author) (Editor)

3.81 · Rating details · 42 ratings · 3 reviews

Nonfiction. Criticism and Theory. Political Science. An infinite series of bifurcations: this is how we can tell the story of our life, of our loves, but also the history of revolts, defeats and restorations of order. At any given moment different paths open up in front of us, and we are continually presented with the alternative of going here or going there. Then we decid ...more

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Paperback, 153 pages

Published September 1st 2009 by Minor Compositions (first published 2009)

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Jul 24, 2010 David rated it really liked it

This book is great fun; a genuinely enjoyable work of theory. Bifo has a certain reputation as the wild man of post-Workerist (aka Italian autonomist) theory - he was the real activist, spending years doing pirate radio, but he's also extremely bipolar, given to wild bouts of enthusiasm and troughs of utter despair - but somehow, often overlapping in his own unique signature way, whereby he can announce that revolutionary hope is dead, that the only possible remaining radical gesture is self-mut This book is great fun; a genuinely enjoyable work of theory. Bifo has a certain reputation as the wild man of post-Workerist (aka Italian autonomist) theory - he was the real activist, spending years doing pirate radio, but he's also extremely bipolar, given to wild bouts of enthusiasm and troughs of utter despair - but somehow, often overlapping in his own unique signature way, whereby he can announce that revolutionary hope is dead, that the only possible remaining radical gesture is self-mutilation, but do so in such a cheerful, playful, charming fashion that one can't help but feel invigorated by the experience anyway. (Plus he cured me of a terrible stomach ailment in Japan so I will always appreciate him for this, but that's another story.) One might say: he's the only person I've ever met that can be both manic and depressive at the same time.

The limitation - for me, anyway, but it's my review, so that's what's relevant - is that he does accept, and start from, what might be called the canonical, Negrist wing of post-Workerism - the "law of value no longer exists" pomo branch, which I find problematic in a lot of ways. I much prefer the alternative tradition represented by say, Massimo de Angelis or the Midnight Notes Collective. Still, Bifo's not especially attached to most of these assumptions, they're just assumed by the tradition he's coming out of. What he does do is something the others of that tradition almost never do, which is, look at what all this means for real people's lives, work, and existence. For most continental theorists, it's all supposedly about that, but you never quite get to the object - as in Maurizio Lazzarato's famous essay on immaterial labor where he starts by saying that a "vast and growing body of empirical research" carried out by him and his colleagues has shown how different new forms of labor are than ever before, and then never cites any of it or even drops the tiniest hint as to what sorts of jobs the research addresses or what it specifically uncovered, but just goes on to make airy generalizations couched in terms of pure abstraction. Bifo is very different. He talks about real problems, real issues, real struggles, and while a lot of his analyses are zany in their over-enthusiasm (under Bush, the capitalists lost power and were replaced by a new ruling class of warriors and neoliberal technicians...) and he endorses some of the sillier excesses of the Negrian political analysis (computer geeks will be the next wave of revolution) he nonetheless manages to come up with profound, exciting, and, indeed, hopeful analyses again and again and again. There's always something surprising here. And in a way it doesn't matter whether many of these arguments are right or wrong; or even if they're often annoying, because they're almost always annoying in a good way; they cause you to think and see the world in a new way; they are endlessly provocative and engaging. ...more

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Nov 24, 2017 Angélica rated it really liked it · review of another edition

A veces un poco pesado, pero sin duda una interesante explicación del impacto que tiene en la sociedad un cambio de código lingüístico.

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May 11, 2013 Chris rated it it was ok

Much weaker in comparison to his most engaging book *The Soul at Work*.

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About Franco Bifo Berardi

Franco Bifo Berardi

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Franco "Bifo" Berardi (born 2 November 1948 in Bologna, Italy) is an Italian Marxist theorist and activist in the autonomist tradition, whose work mainly focuses on the role of the media and information technology within post-industrial capitalism. Berardi has written over two dozen published books, as well as a more extensive number of essays and speeches.

Unlike orthodox Marxists, Berardi's auton ...more