Introduction to Franco 'Bifo' Berardi's The Completion

Alfie Bown

9 May 2025

Everyday Analysis is publishing a new print version of The Completion, with new artwork and an introduction, for our London Reading Group. You can order a copy here.

As is well known, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi is one of the most important thinkers writing today. In ‘The Completion’ he talks about one of the most important topics of today: the development of machine learning and AI and its psychological and material effects. In this short piece, he asks us to think differently about the whole question of technology in our presently reorganising capitalist society. Ultimately, he argues that our technology attempts to universalise us, but it can only do so by achieving a dream: the dream of eradicating our only true universal feature, that of organic human drive, with all its chaos and difference.

As a departure point, Berardi points out that much of the tech jargon around AI and its anthropomorphisms are designed to misguide us. Rather than creating human-like machines, these technologies produce a new kind of global cognitive machine that replaces specific skills previously present in humans.

The current stage of the development of AI is probably taking us to the threshold of a leap to a dimension that I would define as a pervasive global cognitive automaton. The automaton is not an analogue of the human organism, but the convergence of innumerable devices generated by scattered artificial intelligences. The evolution of AI does not lead to the creation of androids, to the perfect simulation of the conscious organism. It rather manifests as the replacement of specific skills with pseudo-cognitive automatons that are linked together, converging in a global cognitive automaton.

At this point we are in the realm of cybernetics. Cybernetics, and what would later give rise to Actor Network Theory and the work of writers like Bruno Latour, would conceptualise the world as a series of nodes or actors, each connected in an infinite distributed network. Some of these actors are humans, some animal, some organic matter, and others are machines, hardware, software, algorithm and AI. What we are dealing with – for Berardi, as for this tradition – is not the replacement of humans with machines but organisational changes to the distributed network of actors in which we are each a part. This organisational change, as Berardi reminds us, is governed by material and economic change:

Obviously, every artificial intelligence project will include criteria that correspond to a vision of the world, a cosmology, an economic interest, a system of values in conflict with others.

As our networks are reshaped, with certain specific roles previously played by humans now replaced by the pseudo-cognitive automatons of the moment, the flows of capital, labour patterns, rights and protections change with it. There is something of posthumanism in this argument, only without the positive inflection associated with that term. It is the role of some specific humans that has been relegated and decentred by the pseudo-cognitive automatons that enter the network, not that of all humans, as some in the posthuman tradition might argue (or even celebrate).

The discourse around technology today, in academies and in tech circles, has long been influenced by that of cybernetics. Alex Taek-Gwang Lee identifies the split between cybernetics and information theory. While one interpretation of cybernetics, associated with the French tradition, would focus – as Berardi does – on the power relations that were present in and would limit the potential of automation and computation to control and codify organic life, the Anglo-American tradition – still prominent in Silicon Valley – would emphasise the potential for curation and control of organic populations:

In the context of this acceptance, a French interpretation of the concept of cybernetics itself was added.  The understanding of the term in the French context was more centered on the issue of “automation” and its limitations than the Anglo-American terminology of cybernetics, which was more orientated towards the monolithic explanations of “control” and “feedback.”

This Anglo-American version of cybernetics would be taken up in the US, and would receive support from major international corporations interested in and associated with tech. As Gwang-Lee explains:

In post-war America, cybernetics and information theory played a decisive role in establishing itself as a new social theory, with significant financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Josiah Messer Jr. Foundation. In this process, cybernetics and information theory were the source of sociological concepts such as encoding, decoding, information, feedback, entropy, and systems that are familiar to us today. [i]

As Berardi reminds us in ‘The Completion’ above, each attempt to design the society of the future – including those of the cybernetics – would have its own ‘a vision of the world,’ its own cosmology and its own economic interests and values, but “each will claim universality.” These are those models in the Anglo-American tech tradition, who would seek systems not which focussed on their limitations but which dreamt of eradicating and overcoming them. This would be a positivist form of universality that would claim to speak for and represent all actors in a network (or at least aim toward doing so). They offered new forms of democratization and employed concepts like horizontality and collaboration to cover over its particular political and economic biases through the illusion of universality.

Against this, however, is another kind of universality which Berardi frames as the chaotic, messy, human or organic drive. These inconsistent, failing, contradictory drives cannot be ordered by the machinic logic, despite the best attempts of technology to codify and include them in positivist terms. Only the identity of humans can be included, not their organicism.

The general function of the inorganic intelligent entity is to introduce the information order into the organism endowed with drives. The automaton has an ordering mission, but it encounters a factor of chaos along the way: the organic drive, irreducible to numerical order.

This organic or human drive that resists numerical order is the only thing we have in common – and which we do not share with the other non-human nodes in our network. Berardi does not mention psychoanalysis in this piece, but the language of the drive is borrowed from Freud and from Lacan.

Writing toward the end of his career in Television, Jacques Lacan would say in provocative terms that unlike the subject’s that had existed since the times of Freud, the subject of media would be a subject with no unconscious. This subject would be psychotic because it would not locate an unconscious within itself. Instead, it would be a subject who was only capable of responding to external stimulus, not to tarrying with external stimulus via its affects, unconscious and drives. This would make it the subject of media (prone to directly responding to images placed in front of it) and of capitalism (susceptible to the charms of every commodity).

Perhaps this is something of the subject Berardi imagines in The Completion – a subject who would complete the dream of the Anglo-American model of cyberneticists by eradicating the organic human chaotic drives that unite us and allow to respond to and resist the power in our networks. Instead, we would become only identities – rather than organic beings. In this case, it would be us who became like the automatons, rather than the reverse.

---

[i] Alex Taek-Gwang Lee, ‘French Theory and Cybernetics’, Kritike, Vol. 18, No. 4 (February 2025), pp. 10-27 (p. 17).