Franco "Bifo" Berardi. 2009. The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy.  Trans. Francesca Cadel & Giuseppina Mecchia. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). 

To Berardi, the immaterial forces of language and money are not simply metaphors but the viral forces of semiocapitalism: "They are the soul of Semiocapital." (2009: 22)  

The soul is the vital breath that makes an animated body out of biological matter. In The Soul at Work, Berardi takes the concept (as metaphor and ironically) to examine contemporary forms of work and alienation. He insists on the shift of attention to the way that the contemporary mode of production converts mind, language and creativity into value. Therefore the examination of the combined territories of the intellect, language and imagination become core concerns to understand contemporary forms of alienation. 

To understand alienation, he charts its passage from the Hegelian-Marxist tradition where it is measured between human essence and the perversion of this into work activity, the spilt between life and labour (close to Arendt's distinctions), to the Italian Workerist tradition where it is defined in relation to labour time and the creation of value, "the reification of body and soul" (22-3). The break that Workerism represents is in rejecting the passivity of the worker and insisting on the possibilities of active "refusal of work", its liberation from the capitalist valorization process (see Tronti). The genealogy of alienation demonstrates how antagonism in the refusal of work has moved to a situation where work ever more seems to defines who we are. Labour power has become human capital that integrates the intellect, language, and imagination, and produces new kinds of subjectivities. 

The further addition, the soul, is to try to integrate the biopolitical dimension and what he refers to as the "psychopathologies of desire" (24). It is a useful addition to the understanding of desire too (inherited from Deleuze and Guattari), that lies not in opposition to domination but indicates a force-field of potential that is able to be captured as much by Disney or Microsoft as much as the social movements (117-8). The psychopathology of desire is in recognition of the ways in which the soul has been broken and subjectivity is effectively soul-less, desire and the soul have been colonized and cast into depressed states. 

The management of happiness is key to this. Happiness is ideological. The situation in which the soul is put to work, Berardi calls the "factory of unhappiness" (90), where following a biopolitical line of argument, psychopathology has become a technique of control. It is not just value that is produced but subjectivity, and one that is not altogether happy. This leads to "prozac-economy" within which unhappiness is carefully managed. (see notes elsewhere for this). 

What needs to be rediscovered is happiness tied to collective formations such as the commons and communism. "For Marx, the privileged example of really free working - happiness itself - is 'composition,' the construction of the communist score. […] communism whose song will free the space in which it resonates, and spreads." (Jason Smith, "Preface: Soul on Strike", in Berardi 2009: 19) 

The speed of communications contributes to this as general intellect is no longer able to adequately process the complexity of information that is being generated. Alienation has become a kind of dyslexia. 

The soul stands in for this additional aspect that has been further stolen from the human subject. Berardi uses the example of cellular phones to demonstrate the "network dependency" that underpins the social factory, such that info-workers continue to work even when not working. The digital network more generally facilitates the spatial and temporal globalization of labour but the cellular qualities of this recombine semiotic fragments endlessly to produce semiocapitalism (2009: 89). The most important commodity of late capitalism, the mobile phone, is the instrument of semiocapital, melting our brains both literally and metaphorically.    

In other words, the soul has been put to work. 

All is not lost. Berardi reads the present financial crisis as the "return of the soul", like the return of the repressed. If neoliberalism attempted to capture the soul, it failed, having wrongly assumed "that the soul can be reduced to mere rationality" (2009: 207). The soul is more unpredictable than the mind or body. For Beradi, the process of autonomy is part of therapy, and communism one of its possible forms, but not a totalisation (220-1). Again, this is why the soul makes a useful frame of reference as something nonknown and chaotic, its potentialities irreducible to the market or even language. In this sense it remains a vital breath and is close to voice.  


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general intellect:
Class antagonism was transformed into a broader dynamic, that recognized the "collapse of the distinction between conception and execution, between the managing of production and production itself" generalizing the site of conflict to society as a whole, the social factory. (Jason Smith, "Preface: Soul on Strike", in Berardi 2009)