Conversation on Futurability

In September 2018, I travelled to Bologna to discuss a draft of my book Sad by Design, which the Italian media theorist and activist Franco Berardi helped to shape. A year earlier I had read his work Futurability, the Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility. That book opens with the weary observation that Berardi is not going to write about the future again – or about any future, for that matter. He has done so exhaustingly, for instance in his 2011 book After the Future. Instead, Berardi wants to write now about the process of becoming other: “possibility is content, potency is energy, and power is form.” While being a decade younger, I do have much in common with Berardi. Most of all I relate to his shifts in moods and attentions, from political strategizing to dark thinking and the desire to quit the scene altogether, walk away, remain silent and retreat, in order to create space for something new. In our regressive era that lacks progressive social movements, it is important to state that, in such a Zeitgeist, liberation is unlikely. Berardi teaches us that we have to abandon hope. What does it mean when we witness that the “social body is separated from the brain” and becomes “incapable of strategy or empathy”? Are we really incapacitated by our impotency to change? Can we be this honest towards our own defeat and the failures of others around us? Are you ready to discuss the decline of potency? Once you are you can enter the Berardi universe beyond the future.