Chaos and the Automaton

This selection of key essays collected here presents Berardi’s prescient interventions into a decade-plus of social turmoil, offering a tour through the cataclysms that have rocked the foundations of the global order in the years since the 2008 financial crisis, from European austerity, Occupy, The Arab Spring, and Anonymous through the ascendance of Pope Francis, Brexit, Covid-19, the Trump-Biden sequence, the US Capitol riots, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine—and some of the bizarre new cultural appearances they have ushered in.

Berardi’s essays reveal a sustained and singular effort to reveal the psychic and material underpinnings of a society in which history came roaring back at the same moment as any vision of a sustainable future receded far out of sight. “I know that it is dangerous to write in simultaneity with events that nobody can precisely foresee, that can only be vaguely intuited,” he wrote on the eve of the 2020 American elections, “but the only way to imagine something about the becoming of the psycho-sphere is to run ahead of the dynamics of the disaster.”  To do so, Berardi draws not only from current events, but also movements and figures at the firmament of his thought, such as Guattari, Italian street art of the 1970s, and Pasolini.