In the middle of the weekend and in the middle of the night, we got a message from work. What's our response? Read it and answer it. This is the striking starting point of the last book by the philosopher Maurizio Ferraris, Total Mobilization.
The title refers to a concept coined by the philosopher and writer Ernest Jünger in 1930, through which he tried to think about the novelty of the First World War: it made the distinctions between work and leisure, between public and private, between production and reproduction disappear, promoting an "absolute availability" in time and space to economic-military power.
Are the frontiers between working and living times disappearing today, paradoxically in times of peace, with new forms of work and communication, and are we today, through our mobile phones, always "available" to the call of power?
The message that you receive, the calls' that we receive every day on our mobile phones, must not be confused with simple transmissions of information, with mere forms of communication, but must rather be thought of as a command, as an order. It's your proposal. What kind of order? A call to do what?
Like an order based on the same authority as that of "the face of the other" in the ethics of Lévinas: the other calls me, I have to respond, not answering him would mean denying him human dignity, not considering him as an interlocutor. But obviously, this authority is not necessarily so noble and humanitarian. It can be the authority of a superior, the emperor's letter or, in short, of someone who has power over us and who asks us for something, for example that we work at any time wherever we are. Whether it is the face of the other as weakness, or an authoritarian request, it is in any case an order, and the social world is based precisely on this order: in essence, if I did not respond to their demands it would be rude, but if I respond to their demands I react to an order, however kind and cordial it may be.
Why do we respond to the call, what makes it so irresistible, and what role does the individual responsibility to which the call calls us play play there, as well as the search for recognition to which we are so subject today?
Imagine a world in which no calls were ever answered. It would be a world without motives, obviously, but it would also be a world without letters (why write if nobody answers?), without books (why write if nobody reads?), therefore also without blogs (and, therefore, you might ask yourself what we do, who is reading to us at the moment and me). What would be worse: it would be a world without humanity, because human beings are social animals, therefore they respond to the call, by definition. They seem to me to be strong enough arguments to answer the call.
How can we understand this "guilt", an evil that seemed to be associated with cultural landscapes impregnated with religion, and what, if anything, can be done to combat it?
The guilt, in fact, seems to have to do with the religious: the "Where are you?" that we say on the telephone reminds us very much of the "Where is your brother?" with which God questions Cain. At the same time, I do not believe that guilt is an effect of religion; rather, religion is one of the infinite consequences of guilt, which seems inherent in human nature.
And to be afflicted by guilt is not an evil at all. When we find someone immune to guilt, we are hardly faced with a free Nietzschean spirit (assuming something like that ever existed, since Nietzsche was anything but immune to guilt). Most of the time he's an idiot, an insensitive, a brute, a criminal. In other words, feeling guilty is not good, but not feeling guilty is worse.
The title of the book, and much of its reflection, refers to the concept of "total mobilization" in Jünger. In this 1930 essay, we analyze how military-economic power demands total availability, it feeds on the destruction of senses capable of guiding us autonomously and eliminates the frontiers between work and leisure, inside and outside, production and reproduction, public and private, how do you relate to this concept of Jünger, how do you take it up and resignify it, how can it be that a 1930 concept, associated with the experience of the First World War, serves today to explain the present?
Obviously, it is a paradox and it was this paradox that made me think. Jünger dreamed of a totalitarian state, but this totalitarian state was carried out imperfectly. As late as 1943, Goebbels complained that in Germany they were not yet ready for all-out war and that there were traces of bourgeois life left behind. One could conclude that if not even the Nazis were able to carry out the full mobilization, then no one can achieve it. However, this has not been the case.
Half a century after the Second World War, and in liberal countries, characterized by a strong emphasis on individual rights, the web and the mobile phone have appeared, and at this point the full mobilization has begun: the need to respond at any time; the disappearance of the difference between working time and life time (which was not only Jünger's dream, but also one of the dreams of communist society according to Marx); the disappearance of classes, replaced by monads connected to each other through the screens of their apparatuses (and also the disappearance of classes was an objective not only of Jünger but also of Marx).
The result is, paradoxically, that our society - the so-called neoliberal, turbocapitalist society, etc. - is no longer capitalist, but rather remembers aspects of communism carried out according to Marx. Instead of goods, we produce documents (that is, we put the relationship between people who previously hid and reified in goods in the foreground). Instead of paid work we have an unpaid mobilization whose only objective is recognition by others (there is nothing more narcissistic than the selfie: Narcissus was not connected, who does the selfie yes and does it precisely because he is connected). Instead of the alienation that forces us to make repetitive gestures that are reproduced for hours throughout a working life, we have the disappearance of the difference between life and work, that is, the realization of the communist humanity of German ideology, the one in which in the morning one goes fishing, in the afternoon one criticizes, in the evening one attends to the cattle (mutatis mutandis: in the morning one flies low cost, in the afternoon one discusses in a blog, in the evening one takes part in a Talent festival...)..
Are we happy? It's obvious you don't. But at least we have to do one thing, out of intellectual honesty: stop talking about turbocapitalism, unleashed liberalism, cunning plots and plots, and instead look at the characteristics of the world we live in (and our responsibilities within it). Only this examination of reality will make criticism effective, and transformation possible.
Undoubtedly, in today's "total mobilization" one of the most important factors is registration, writing. What kind of registration and writing is it in the case of the web and the mobile phone? what differentiates this "writing" from other power writings (that of bureaucratic power, for example)? what is the specific power of this?
I don't believe that writing on the web is different from that of bureaucratic power, it is the same thing, and precisely for this reason the web mobilizes with the same authority, and with greater efficiency (being ubiquitous) than traditional bureaucracy. So much so that the bureaucracy becomes more powerful - and not just more user-friendly, as is often the case - through the web. We no longer have to queue up to get documents, this is the convenience for us. But on the other hand, the bureaucracy can know many things (if we have paid the bills, what our rent is) and be sure that their messages reach us instantly, and reach us, our smartphone. This is the comfort of bureaucracy.
Above all, there is no longer any difference between us and the bureaucracy, as each of us becomes a bureaucrat of ourselves and of others: Whatsapp's double check is a very powerful legal and bureaucratic system that ensures with certainty not only that we have received the message, but also that we have read it and that, therefore, we are fully responsible for our possible non-response.
Can we not answer the call? do you imagine individual and collective forms of unavailability, forgetfulness, loss and untraceability? Is refusing visibility and traceability necessarily suicidal? A whole series of contemporary thinkers and radical groups, such as Franco Berardi (Bifo) or the Invisible Committee, are thinking (and trying to practice) forms of "disconnection": anonymity, invisibility, subtraction, etc. What would your proposal, your line of flight be in this sense?
My line of flight is not disappearance, but understanding. To disappear, to become unlocatable, is the romantic solution: to go and live in the country and dream of that state of nature. But what did Voltaire say to Rousseau: "After reading your book, you have the desire to walk on all fours, but since I lost the habit more than sixty years ago, I fear I won't be able to get it back. And he goes on to comment on the fact that he cannot reach the state of nature because he needs doctors; I could say the same thing: rheumatism does not allow me to flee to nature, not even that kind of particularly radical flight that is disconnection. I leave this company to the youngest or the most heroic, so I limit myself to wanting the development of a practical reason for the web, of rules to civilize the practice on the web and, for my part, I try to do what I can to contribute to this development.