Mapping a Precarious Ethics in the COVID-19 Pandemic: Semiocapitalism, the “New” Cognitariat, and Chaosmosis

Abstract

This article seeks to map out a precarious ethics in the age of the COVID-19 pandemic. Primarily, I reconstruct Franco Berardi’s theorization of Semiocapitalism. The post-Fordist configuration of semiocapitalism has introduced novel forms of production, relations, and oppression, as well as spawned the emergence of a new virtual class―the ‘cognitariat.’ I expand the cognitariat’s scope by including the students and teachers. In aiming to provide a more nuanced chronicle of the plight of the cognitariats, I seek the help of Byung-Chul Han, specifically, his diagnosis of the contemporary disappearance of community. Against the backdrop of the pandemic and the comprehensive utilization of virtual education, semiocapitalism strengthens and the cognitariat’s precarity exacerbates. As such, the proliferation of psychopathologies, such as fatigue, depression, and suicide, especially in Third World countries, aggravates. Lastly, I diagram some pathways of becoming-chaoide that can serve as vectors of mutation and emancipation from the different forms of barbarism today. Diagramming a precarious ethics today necessitates the creation of minoritarian refrains, ruptures, and novel forms of subjectivation in the “new normal.” © 2021 Raniel SM. Reyes