‘We can reach every point in the world but, more importantly, we can be reached from any point in the world. Privacy and its possibilities are abolished. Attention is under siege everywhere. Not silence but uninterrupted noise, not the red desert, but a cognitive space overcharged with nervous incentives to act: this is the alienation of our times...’ from The Soul at Work

To be touched increasingly means to be in touch. Franco Berardi Bifo is a writer, media theorist and media activist. Over many years he has analysed the relation between the changing nature of work and the increasing use by capitalism of communication technologies and culture to generate value out of our creativity and emotions. In this lecture he will discuss sensibility and the psychopathology implied in the connective mutation of the general intellect. What are the possibilities for a therapy that is conceived in terms of social control to become a new path of autonomisation from the capitalist domination of the mind?

Franco Berardi founded the magazine A/traverso (1975-1981) and was part of the staff of Radio Alice, the first free pirate radio station in Italy (1976-1978). Like other intellectuals involved in the political movement of Autonomia in Italy during the 1970s, he fled to Paris, where he worked with Felix Guattari in the field of schizoanalysis. From his numerous publications Felix, Precarious Rhapsody and The Soul at Work have appeared in English.