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Heroes and Two Faces of Apocalypse

The creative ways of frustration

Heroes tackles a topic that not everybody feels comfortable talking about: death; In particular two
kinds of death that are still taboo in our society, (mass) murder and suicide.
Mass murder (a suicide by proxy) and suicide are symptoms of the social and political chaos towards
which Capitalism is leading us. Bifo introduces the term “Semiocapitalism” as the reflection of
capitalism in every aspect of our lives. Suicide has become the only way out, the affective approach
to the social process, a form to accelerate the personal apocalypse in a world that we are probably
unable to change.

Television and, more recently, the digital revolution have ushered in formidable transformations to the
human mental environment. The fact that human beings learn more vocabulary from a machine than
from their mothers is undeniably leading to the development of a new kind of sensibility. The new
forms of mass psychopathology of our time cannot be investigated without due consideration of the
effects of this new environment, in particular the new process of language learning. Two main
developments demand consideration: the first is the disassociation of language learning from the
bodily affective experience; the second is the virtualization of the experience of the other.

Information technologies and the accelerated exploitation of the neural energy (capacity?) they
brought have already resulted in semiotic exchanges that are far beyond the natural but quite limited
capacity of the human brain when it comes to paying attention and staying alert all the time. New
codes for meaning and communication have been imposed by semiocapitalism and triggered
dramatic changes in the way people perceive their identity. Constant deterritorialization and re-
territorialization caused by political immigration and displacement are fertile ground for reactionary
identity politics as they create and nurture the need for socio-cultural belonging that manifests in
aggressiveness against a perceived ‘Other’, that is a threat to the so-called true and also purified
origins. People are forced to hold on to imagined identities assembled from false memories of what
their origins as a human group used to be. But such false memories are nothing more than accurate
reflections mirrored by the gaze of the other, the same other that used to generate interdictions and
initiate banishment -- the oppressor.

If for certain human groups and communities in the past, suicidal strategies came as a direct result of
constant humiliation and the obsession with identitarian belonging, for today's semio-workers, suicide
is a way out from their seemingly inescapable condition. Semio-workers find no shelter from the
nonstop and pathogenic acceleration of stimuli. They are not safe from the mutation of their own
minds and, as a result, their physical structure will eventually be drawn into the crash as well. Suicide
has long moved beyond being a marginal phenomenon in the psychopathological area. Instead, we
should acknowledge a real suicide epidemic.

Suicide has become a political act.

So how can we deal with this seemingly insurmountable problem?

Bifo proposes “irony”. Irony has an acceptance, a rendition, dystopia in irony, the starting point for a
new reflection, for a new imagination, of political imagination, dyst-irony. He proposes not to take
part of any movement, stay away from them, political awareness won’t help us, knowing things are
wrong won’t change the essence.

Two Faces of Apocalypse

Hardt describes a different process that can be taken as a starting point to reconcile two main groups
of political activists nowadays. According to Hardt, their impossibility to act lies in the incongruence of
the definition of The Common.

While ecological activists describe The Common as the earth and its ecosystems (the
ecological/natural common), the anti-capitalists define it as the products of the human action we share
(social/economic/artificial common).
Nevertheless, Hardt suggest that both reactionary groups have a common enemy, property relations,
so they could unify forces and create a common theoretical base. This theoretical base could be laid
out defining a central element. This central element is well defined in the Natural Common (if we
destroy nature, she will strike back in one way or another), it is not well defined in the Social Common.
.
The hypothesis of finding ourselves in a change of epoch from a capitalist economy based on
industrial production to one based on immaterial or biopolitical production has been proposed.
The author brings 3 arguments to support his vision: 1) the capitalist economy has been focused on
industrial production, 2) industrial production no longer has a central position in the capitalist
economy, 3) The central element of industrial production is being occupied by immaterial production.

Immobile property> mobile property

MATERIAL > IMMATERIAL AND REPRODUCIBLE PROPERTY

This intangible production tends to be common. Keeping private ideas and knowledge prevents the
production of new ideas and knowledge. Paradoxically, capital increases thanks to the common. A
contradiction appears at the heart of capitalist production between the need for the common in the
interest of productivity and the need for the private in the interest of capitalist accumulation.

The second common feature of both domains is the difficulty of giving value to the Common, the
value of the common challenges the measures.

Analyzing this, we can erase the contradiction between limit and limitlessness.. While the ecological
common refers to the land and its resources, the social common refers to ideas and knowledge that
do not know scarcity, in that sense, instead of contradicting themselves, they would complement each
other.

The second contradiction lies in the role of humanity in the common. While the ecological common
goes beyond humanity, the social takes humanity as a central edge..

These contradictions derive from political antinomies: 1) antinomy of government between autonomy
and action of the state, 2) knowledge, with the assumption that everyone has access to the
knowledge necessary for political action, 3) the temporal antinomy, while the common social demands
an immediate urgency which is impossible, the natural common needs immediate action, because we
are at a point of no return.

From this antinomy of temporality the two sides of the apocalypse are derived. The capitalist
movements struggle to precipitate an event of radical transformation. In contrast, the apocalyptic
imagination of the ecological movements sees this radical transformation as a final catastrophe.

Conclusion

Bifo’s book is the climax of the Burnout Society of Han Byung Chul. Suicide as the ultima escape
from fatigue, to the idea of being able to do anything, to the excess of positivity that Capitalism sells
us, to Us as our own oppressors. Excess of information that becomes noise, loss of identity, the most
daring will want to take others with them.
On the other hand, political activists, the conscious, the one who are fighting for the changes, are
unable to come to an agreement.
As Bifo proposes more than a political mobilization we might need to use our imagination, in order to
look for creative ways to make small changes or get as far away from the system as possible:
Sujonomo N in Seoul, or the movie Captain Fantastic, are examples of the creative ways of
frustration.