Semiocapitalism Neoliberalism has fundamentally changed our interactions

with the material world. Semiocapitalism is ingrained in our society and has
created an oversaturation of information. The affirmative’s fantasy of
political change just reentrenches semiocap by ignoring how future
orientations are always rooted in modern capitalism. Berardi:
By the end of the decade, notwithstanding the victory of Barack Obama in the United States, the
prospect was gloomy. Corporate capitalism and neoliberalism have produced lasting damage in
the material structures of the world and in the social, cultural, and nervous systems of
humankind. In the century's last decade, a new movement emerged and grew fast and wide,
questioning everywhere the power of capitalist corporations. I use the word "movement" to
describe a collective displacing of bodies and minds, a changing of consciousness, habits,
expectations. Movement means conscious change, change accompanied by collective
consciousness and collective elaboration, and struggle. Conscious. Collective. Change. This is
the meaning of "movement." From Seattle 1999 to Genoa 2001 a movement tried to stop the
capitalist devastation of the very conditions of civilized life. These were the stakes, no more, no
less. Activists around the world had a simple message: if we don't stop the machine of
exploitation, debt, and compulsory consumption, human cohabitation on the planet will become
dismal, or impossible. Well, ten years after Seattle, in the wake of the 2009 Copenhagen summit
failure, we can state that those people were speaking the truth. The global movement
against capitalist globalization reached an impressive range and
pervasiveness, but it was never able to change the daily life of society. It
remained an ethical movement, not a social transformer. It could not create a
process of social recomposition, it could not produce an effect of social
subjectivation. Those people were silenced by President Bush, after the huge
demonstrations of February 1 5, 2003, when many millions of people worldwide gathered in the
streets against the war in Iraq. The absence of movement is visible today, at the end of the zero
zero decade: the absence of an active culture, the lack of a public sphere, the void of collective
imagination, palsy of the process of subjectivation. The path to a conscious collective subject
seems obstructed. What now? A conscious collective change seems impossible at the level of
daily life. Yes, I know, change is happening everyday, at a pace that we have never experienced
before. What is the election of a black President in the United States if not change? But change is
not happening in the sphere of social consciousness. Change happens in the spectacular sphere of
politics, not in daily life-and the relationship between politics and daily life has become so
tenuous, so weak, that sometimes I think that, whatever happens in politics, life will not change.
The fantastic collapse of the economy is certainly going to change things in daily life: you can
bet on it. But is this change consciously elaborated? Is this connected with some conscious
collective action? It isn't. This is why neoliberal fanaticism, notwithstanding its failure, is
surviving and driving the agenda of the powers of the world. The so-called counter globalization
movement, born in Seattle at the close of the century, has been a collective conscious actor, a
movement of unprecedented strength and breadth. But, I repeat, it has changed nothing in the
daily life of the masses; it hasn't changed the relationship between wage labor and capitalist
enterprise; it hasn't changed daily relationships among precarious workers; it hasn't changed the
lived conditions of migrants. It hasn't created solidarity between people in the factories, in the
schools, in the cities. Neoliberal politics have failed, but social autonomy hasn't emerged. The
ethical consciousness of the insanity of neoliberal politics spread everywhere, but it did not
shape affective and social relations between people. The movement remains an expression of
ethical protest. It has, nonetheless, produced effects. The neoliberal ideology that was once
accepted as the word of God, as a natural and indisputable truth, started to be questioned and
widely denounced in the days following the Seattle riots. But the ethical demonstrations did not
change the reality of social domination. Global corporations did not slow the exploitation
of labor or the massive destruction of the planet's environment. Warmongers
did not stop organizing and launching deadly attacks against civilian
populations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, and many other parts of the world. Why?
Why did the largest demonstration in human history, the antiwar Global Action that the
movement launched on February 15, 2003, fail to stop the bombing of Baghdad? Why was
conscious collective action, although massive and global, unable to change things? This is the
question I've been trying to answer for the last ten years. This is the question that I am trying to
answer in this book. I'll say here, in shore, that the answer is not to be found in the political
strategy of the struggle, but in the structural weakness of the social fabric. During the twentieth
century, social struggle could change things in a collective and conscious way because industrial
workers could maintain solidarity and unity in daily life, and so could fight and win. Autonomy
was the condition of victory, because autonomy means the ability to create social solidarity in
daily life, and the ability to self-organize outside the rules of labor and exploitation. Autonomous
community was the condition of political strength. When social recomposition is possible, so is
collective conscious change. In social history we can speak of recomposition when the forces of
labor create common cultural flows and a common ground of sensibility, so that they become a
collective actor, sharing the same questions and sometimes the same answers. In conditions of
social recomposition, social autonomy from capital becomes possible. Autonomy is the
possibility of meeting the power of capital, with counterpower in daily life, in factories,
neighborhoods, homes, in the affective relationships between people. That seems to be over. The
organization of labor has been fragmented by the new technology, and workers' solidarity has
been broken at its roots. The labor market has been globalized, but the political organization of
the workers has not. The infosphere has dramatically changed and accelerated,
and this is jeopardizing the very possibility of communication, empathy, and
solidarity.
Their lustful extrapolation of catastrophe with lines like “Leads to extinction ”
is a psychological blindfold used to serve the purposes of governmentality and
ignore the disaster of the everyday. Unable to ever be realized, Armageddon
becomes simulated in order to summon a specific solution already decided in
advance, creating a desire for real disaster as a relief from continually
constructed anxiety—capitalism captures this desire and creates exhaustion
The Invisible Committee 16:
The Invisible Committee is a collective and anonymous pen name, it is believed to be a group of
French insurrectionist anarcho-communists. Its writing discusses the current epoch of
insurrectionist movements around the world in relation to theory, movements, capital,
governments, and other topics. “To Our Friends” Semiotext(e), Intervention Series, No. 18, pg
35-37.

One shouldn’t underestimate the craving for apocalypse, the lust for
Armageddon that permeates the epoch. Its particular existential pornography involves ogling
prefigurative documentaries showing clouds of computer-animated grasshoppers descending on
the Bordeaux vineyards in 2075, juxtaposed with “climate migrants” storming the southern
shores of Europe—the same migrants that Frontex is already making a point of decimating.
Nothing is older than the end of the world. The apocalyptic passion has always been
favored by the powerless since earliest antiquity. What is new in our epoch is that the
apocalyptic has been totally absorbed by capital, and placed in its service. The horizon of
catastrophe is what we are currently being governed by. Now, if there is one thing
destined to remain unfulfilled, it’s the apocalyptic prophecy, be it economic, climatic, terrorist,
or nuclear. It is pronounced only in order to summon the means of averting it, which is to say,
most often, the necessity of government. No organization, whether political or religious, has ever
declared itself defeated because the facts contradicted its prophecies. Because the purpose of
prophecy is never to be right about the future, but to act upon the present: to impose a waiting
mode, passivity, submission, here and now. Not only is there no catastrophe to come
other than the one that’s already here, it’s evident that most actual disasters
offer an escape from our daily disaster. Many examples attest to the relief
from existential apocalypse that real disaster brings, from the earthquake that
struck San Francisco in 1906 to Hurricane Sandy that devastated New York
in 2012. One generally assumes that the relations between people in an
emergency situation reveal their deep and eternal bestiality. With every
destructive earthquake, every economic crash and every “terrorist attack,”
one desires to see a confirmation of the old chimera of the state of nature and
its train of uncontrollable violent acts. When the thin dikes of civilization give way, one
would like for the “vile core of man” that obsessed Pascal to show itself, that “human nature”
with its evil passions—envious, brutal, blind and despicable— which has served the holders of
power as an argument at least since Thucydides. Unfortunately the fantasy has been
disconfirmed by most of the historically known disasters. The disappearance of a civilization
generally doesn’t take the form of a chaotic war of all against all. In a situation of extreme
catastrophe, that hostile discourse only serves to justify the priority given to
the defense of property against looting, by the police, the army or, for lack of
anything better, byvigilante militias formed for the occasion. It can also serve
to cover misappropriations by the authorities themselves, like those of the Italian
Civil Protection Department after the Aquila earthquake. On the contrary, the decomposition of
this world, taken on as such, creates openings for other ways of living, including in the middle of
an “emergency situation.” Consider the inhabitants of Mexico City in 1985, who, among the
ruins of their neighborhoods struck by a deadly quake, reinvented the revolutionary carnival and
the figure of the superhero serving the people—in the form of a legendary wrestler, Super Barrio.
In the euphoria of regaining control of their urban existence, they conflated the collapse of
buildings with a breakdown of the political system, releasing the life of the city from the grip of
government as much as possible and starting to rebuild their destroyed dwellings. An
enthusiastic resident of Halifax said something similar when he declared after the hurricane of
2003: “Everybody woke up the next morning and everything was different. There was no
electricity, all the stores were closed, no one had access to media. The consequence was that
everyone poured out into the street to bear witness. Not quite a street party, but everyone out at
once—it was a happy feeling to see everybody even though we didn’t know each other.” The
same as with those miniature communities formed spontaneously in New Orleans in the days
after Katrina, faced with the contempt of the public authorities and the paranoia of the security
agencies, communities that organized daily to feed and clothe themselves and attend to each
other’s needs, even if this required looting a store or two.

Thus the CP text: Debaters ought to engage in a game of imaginary ruins—a

critique of the capitalist world around us by imagining its implosion. Intrinsic
to imagination is unproductivity, a refusal to engage in a world that is defined
unrelentless consumption; instead, imagining a post-capitalist future through
fomenting hatred into new potential subjectivities. It’s conditional
Cunningham 15:
There’s a game that can be played when walking through the city. Any zone of the contemporary
capitalist metropolis will do but it’s best played in one of the centres of accumulation, say
London, than one of the less developed sectors. This rule is not absolute since decaying post-
industrial cities also have their attractions. The game involves an imaginary testing of
the city’s buildings and neighbourhoods for their worthiness for destruction.
This testing asks the question whether or not these office blocks, shops,
apartment blocks, and other excrescent forms of the built environment
deserve to exist in some imaginary post-capitalist future. And needless to say,
whether the forms of life and social relations the contemporary metropolis helps to engender are
not also worthy of a similar negation. It’s a game that can be played singularly or in groups, and
does not so much open up the metropolis as reduce it to a series of potentially empty spaces.
Most of the time this game is disturbingly easy, with the city throwing up future ruins at every
street corner. That squat, concrete block of a police station needs to be reduced to rubble if only
for the misery encrusted in its walls. The many-storied, uninhabitable financial office block
deserves ruination despite the odd attraction of its well-tended atrium as a place of rest. Other
husks of brick, glass, concrete, and dead labour are much less straightforward. A shopping mall,
enlightened glass arcade of circulating bodies and commodities, might also serve other purposes,
glass surfaces and transparencies being capable of reflecting more than the relations of exchange.
The utopian potential of glass architecture, the revolutionary virtues of transparency and
openness, might be realised in the midst of a wider negation of capitalism. Utopian and
revolutionary thinkers such as Charles Fourier and Walter Benjamin thought that such
architecture promised a break with the opacity and interior poverty of private life. Perhaps, the
game suggests, this break could be made actual if the glass cages of the present were put to use
by new collectivities and subjects. It’s a shame that this game is little more than a way of
critically passing the time walking through the shadows cast upon us by the metropolis, its
structures, and apparatuses. Walking around transcribing the potentially empty spaces of the
metropolis, enjoyable as it is, also traces the lack of agency that might make such a negation real.
And such a lack ironically makes negation more necessary than ever. Negation and negativity as
such, that inchoate combination of affects and passions such as boredom, hatred, depression, is
more like a knot pulled ever tighter by this seeming lack of anti-capitalist negation in the present.
Despite the rigours of a long drawn out socio-economic and environmental crisis, the actuality of
the negation of capitalism seems as far away as ever. However, even if critique must operate in
this suspended space it can still register the subjective and political brokenness that accumulates
through the exertions of capitalist value production. The activity of the communist critic can
hopefully be negative enough to find some purchase upon the contradictions
of capitalism that might be valid tender in the marketplaces of negation. The
stalling of negation might in itself provide the possibility of rethinking it
John Cunningham, 2015 "Negation At A Standstill" published in "Bad Feelings" a collection
produced by Arts Against Cuts and published by Book Works as part of Common Objectives