Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Bifo The Uprising
Bifo The Uprising
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Poetry is the language of nonexchangeability, 1 ..,., ' """"
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2021
.847
2012
AC/Mein
Franco "Bifo" Berardi
Published by Semiorext(e)
2007 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 427, Los Angeles, CA 90057
www.semiorexte.com
ISBN: 978-1-58435-112-2
Distributed by The M IT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
and London, England
Printed in the United Stares of America semiotext(e)
intervention
109 8765432
series o 14
Contents
Int roduction 7
References 171
Introduction
-. --
.,,... +\"I
.
were seen in London, Athens, and Rome in Just as the Vienna Congress's restoration was
December 2010, and which became massive in the followed by the People's Spring in 1848, just as
May-June acampada in Spain, in the four August fascism was followed by resistance and liberation,
nights of rage in the English suburbs, and in the so now the political instinct of my generation (the
wave of strikes and occupations in the US. '68 generation, the last modern generation, in a
The European collapse is not simply the effect sense) is expecting the restoration of democracy,
of a crisis that is only economic and financial- the return of social solidarity, and the reversal of
this is a crisis of imagination about the future, as financial dictatorship.
well. The Maastricht rules have become unques- T his expectation may be deceptive, and we
tionable dogmas, algorithmic formulae and magical should be able to enhance the space of our historical
spells guarded by the high priests of the European prefiguration, so as to become able to abandon the
Central Bank and promoted by stockbrokers conceptual framework of historical progress, and
and advisors. to imagine the prospect of irreversibility. In the
Financial power is based on the exploitation of sphere of the current bio-economic totalitarianism,
precarious, cognitive labor: the general intellect in the incorporation of techno-linguistic automa-
its present form of separation from the body. tisms produced by semio-capital has produced a
The general intellect, in its present configuration, form that is not an external domination that acts
is fragmented and dispossessed of self-perception on the body, but a mutation of the social organism
and self-consciousness. O nly the conscious mobi- itself. This is why historical dialectics no longer
lization of the erotic body of the general intellect, work at the level of understanding the process
only the poetic revitalization of language, will and the prospects: the prospect of irreversibility
open the way to the emergence of a new form of is replacing the prospect of subversion, so we
social autonomy. have ro rethink the concept of autonomy from
this perspective.
Irreversibility "Irreversibility" is a taboo word in modern
political discourse, because it contradicts the prin-
It's difficult for someone of my generation to break ciple of rational government of the flow of
free of the intellectual automatism of the dialectical events-which is the necessary condition of
happy ending. rational government, and the primary contribution
naturalistic reproduction. So the word and the In neoliberal parlance, deregulation means
senses started to invent a new world of their own, liberation fro m the constraints generate~ ~y con-
rather than reflect or reproduce existing reality. .
SCIO US
w"111 , but simultaneo usly subm1ss1on to
Neoliberal ideology starts from the same techno-linguistic auto matisms.
emphasis on deregulation and the cult of freedom.
The similarity between poetical and financial Mathematical Ferocity and Symbolic Insolvency
deregulation is misleading, of course, but powerful.
Neoliberal ideology does not intend deregula- Like the impressionist painters, the symbolist poets
ti-o n as the free flight of social molecules out of any also said: "I do not want to show the thing, I want
kind of rule, but it aims to liberate social activity to show the impression."
from any regulation except the regulation of The symbolists invite the reader to forget about
money, and from the rule of competition, which is the referent. The symbolist word is not intended to
the most ferocious. represent the thing, but to evoke a world from the
Here is my point. While liberating it from the imagination.
bonds of political government, financial capitalism The symbolist word is intended to act as an
is subjecting social behavior to techno-linguistic epiphany, an apparition from nothing. I s~y .the
governance. rose, and the rose is there, not because 1t IS a
Governance is a keyword in the process of the represented referent, but because it is the effect ~f
financialization of the world. an act of my voice. It is the effect of a pragmanc
IPure functionality without meaning. Automation displacement of expectations.
of thought and will. In symbolist poetry meaning does not come
The embedding of abstract connections in the fro m the rep resentation of preexisting reality and
relation between living organisms. f from a correspondence with the referent, but
manipulation and deception: their half-truths years beyO nd what was stipulated . in his contract,
and fictions are transformed by the global media I . all this J'ob will not be available for a younger
ogic y f h dd' · al
into "common knowledge." Here are a few such worker throughout the entirety o t e a . mon.
conceptual manipulations which are helping duration. A simple syllogism. Yet economiC policy
neoliberalism destroy European society: over the last thirty years, both on the left and. right
First manipulation: By lowering taxes on the rich, .
wmgs, favors this mysterious and contradictory
you will increase employment. . . le ,·n which elderly workers must be forced
pnnCip
Why should this be the case? Such logic is to work longer in order to increase employment
beyond comprehension. On the contrary: the opportunities for the young. The result being that
owners of capital invest only so long as their profits capitalists, instead of paying a pension to the
are perceived to be guaranteed. Any influence of elderly and a salary to young workers, pay a si.n.gle
state taxation on investment plans is at best salary to averaged workers while blackm:ulmg
inconsequential, and more often than not irrele- unemployed youths into accepting any form
vant. The state should thus progressively increase whatsoever of precarious, underpaid labor.
taxation on the rich in order to further invest Third manipulation: Privatization and market
resources and create jobs. The conceptual foun- competition are the best guarantees of quality for
dation of Reaganomics, the so-called Laffer curve schools and public services.
(progressive lowering of taxes on the affluent), is Over thirty years of rampant privatization has
nothing more than abstract rubbish which has amply demonstrated that the private sector
been transformed into a legislative commandment inherently facilitates drastic reductions in quality.
This is because the private sector is primarily
Like the heroic mythology of fascist nationalism In the next decade, Europe will make a decisive
(and als~ the mythology of advertising), choice. Europe now faces a dilemma between two
Berlusconi s subcul ture is based on a delirium of hypotheses.
power. The former was based on the youthful One path would be to accept a deal that redis-
virtues of strength, energy, and pride; the latter is tributes wealth and resources; that opens Europe's
~ased on the mature virtues of technique, decep- borders to the crowds coming from Africa and
tion, and finance. The nemesis that followed the Asia; that implies a reduction in the Western,
youthful violence of fascism was the Second comsumptive lifestyle, heading instead toward a
World War and its unthinkable surfeit of destruc- nongrowth of production and consumption. This
tion and death. What nemesis will be brought option would not imply the idea of sacrifice and
abou t by the present energolatreia of the old? renunciation, but rather the enjoyment of time
The destiny of Europe will play out in the without any expectation of competitive acquisition
biopolitical sphere, at the border between consu- and accumulation.
merism, techno-sanitarian youth-styled aggressivity, The other would be an intensification of the
and the possible collective consciousness of the interethnic civil war whose first signs are already
limits of the biological (sensitive) organism. visible. The majority of European people are des-
Exhaustion has no place in Western culture, perately defending the privilege accumulated during
and this is a problem right now, because exhaus- rhe centuries of colonialism, but this privilege has
tion needs to be understood and accepted as a new been deteriorating since the fall of colonialist
paradigm for social life. Only the cultural and empires in the past century, and is now falling
psychic elaboration of exhaustion will open the apart in the course of the global recession.
door to a new conception and perception of In the game of economic competition, Europe
wealth and happiness.
cannot win. H ow long will it take to reduce a
T he coming European insurrection will not typical European salary to the level of an Indian,
be an insurrection of energy, but an insurrection Chinese, or Vietnamese worker? It's going to take
of slowness, withdrawal, and exhaustion. It will roo much time and too much violence and blood.
be the autonomization of the collective body This is why financial markets distrust the euro: if
and soul from the exploitation of speed and the standard is capital gain, profit, and competition,
competition.
then Europe's decline is guaranteed.
74 I Ti1e Uprising: On Poetry and F1nance Language. Eccnamy. and the BO:ii I 75
expectations of growth, economists decree that boundless, and social production has to be rede-
society is sick and shivering, and they name rhe fined according to this knowledge.
disease "recession." This diagnosis has nothing to The cognitive transformation of production
do with the needs of the population, because it and the creation of a semio-capitalist sphere have
does nor refer to the use-value of things and of opened a new possibility for expansion-and for a
semiotic goods, bur to abstract capitalist accumu- few years in the 1990s the economy was able to
lation, which is accumulation of exchange value. expand euphorically, while the Internet economy
Growth, in the economic sense, is not about the was expected to furnish a new landscape of infinite
increase of social happiness and satisfaction of the growth. It was a deception, because even if the
basic needs of people, bur about the expansion of general intellect is infinitely productive, the limits
financial profits and the expansion of the global to growth are inscribed in the affective body of
volume of exchange value. Gross national product, cognitive work: limits of attention, of psychic
the main indicator of growth, is nor a measure of energy, of sensibility. After the illusions of the new
social welfare and pleasure, bur a monetary measure. economy (spread by wired neoliberal ideologues)
Social happiness or unhappiness does not and the eventual dot-com crash, the very begin-
generally depend on the amount of money circu- ning of the new century announced the coming
lating in the economy, bur rather depends on the collapse of the financial economy. Since September
distribution of wealth, and on the balance of 2008, we have known that {notwithstanding the
cultural expectations and the availability of physical financial virrualization of expansion) the end of
and semiotic goods. capitalist growth is in sight.
Growth is a cultural concept, more than it is an This could be a curse, if social welfare remains
evaluative economic criterion of social health and dependent on the expansion of monetary profits,
well being. It is linked to the modern conception and if we are unable to redefine social needs and
of the future as infinite expansion. expectations. Bur it could become a blessing if we
For many reasons, infinite expansion has redistribute social product in an egalitarian way,
become an impossible task for the social body. if we share existing resources, and if we revise our
Since the Club of Rome published the book The cultural expectations to be more frugal, replacing
Limits to Growth in 1972, we have been informed the idea that pleasure depends on ever-increasing
that the physical resources of the planet are not consumption.
~J
Language. Econom~·. and tne Body I 77
~
I
Recession and Financial, Impersonal Dictatorship The wealth produced by the collective intelli-
gence has been drawn away and diverted. The effect
Modern culture has equated economic expansion of this displacement is the utter impoverishment of
with futurity, so that for the economists it is some of the richest places in the world, and the
impossible to think the future independently of creation of a destructive financial machine that
economic growth. But this identification has to obliterates use-value and displaces monetary wealth.
be abandoned, and the concept of the future Recession is the economist's way of semiotizing
rethought. The mind of the economist cannot the present contradiction between the productive
make the jump to this new dimension and cannot potency of the general intellect and current finan-
understand this paradigm shift. This is why the cial constraints.
economy is a mess, and why economic wisdom Finance is an effect of the virtualization of reality,
cannot cope with the new reality. The financial acting on the psycho-cognitive sphere of the
semiotization of the economy is a war machine economy. But at the same time, finance is an effect
that destroys social resources and intellectual of the deterritorialization of wealth. It's not easy to
skills on a daily basis. identifY financial capitalists as persons. Finance is
Look at what is happening in Europe. After not the monetary translation of a certain amount of
centuries of industrial production, the European physical goods; it is, rather, an effect of language.
continent is rich. It has millions of technicians, Finance is the transversal function of immateri-
poets, doctors, inventors, specialized factory alization, and the performative action ofindexicality.
workers, nuclear engineers ... So how did we sud- Statistics, figures, indexes, fears, and expectations
denly become so poor? Something very simple are not linguistic representations of some economic
happened. The entirety of the wealth that workers referent that can be found somewhere in the
have produced was poured into the strongboxes of physical world, signifiers referring to a signified.
a minuscule minority of exploiters and speculators. They are performing indexicals, acts of speech that
The whole mechanism of the European financial produce immediate effects in the very instant of
crisis is oriented toward the most extraordinary their enunciation.
displacement of wealth that history has ever This is why, when you go looking for the finan-
known, away from society and toward the financial cial class, you cannot locate someone to talk to, or
class, toward financial capitalism. negotiate with, or an enemy to fight against. There
78 I The Uprising: On Poetry anci Finance Language:. Economy. and the Bx!y I 79
are no enemies or people to negotiate with, bur The key to this disentanglement may be found
only mathematical implications, automatic social in a new form of wisdom which harmonizes with
concatenations that you cannot dismantle or avoid. exhaustion. Exhaustion is a cursed word in the
Finance seems inhumane and pitiless because frame of modern culture, which is based on the
it is not human and therefore has no pity. It can cult of energy and the cult of male aggressivity. But
be defined as a mathematical tumor traversing a energy is fading in the postmodern world, for
large part of society. T hose who are involved in many reasons that are easy to detect.
the financial game are much more numerous than Energy is fading because of the demographic
the property-owners of the old bourgeoisie. trend: mankind is growing old, as a whole,
Often unwittingly and unwillingly, people have because of the prolongation of life expectancy, and
been dragged to invest their money and their because of the decreasing birth rate. A sense of
futures in the financial game. Those who have exhaustion results from this process of general
invested their pensions in private funds, those aging, and what has been considered a blessing-
who have signed mortgages semi-consciously, the prolonged life expectancy-may prove to be a
those who have fallen into the trap of quick cred- misfortune, if the myth of energy is not restrained
it have all become part of the traversal function of and replaced with a myth of solidarity and great
finance. They are poor people, workers, pensioners compassion. Energy is also fading because basic
whose futures depend on the fluctuations of the physical resources like oil are doomed to extinction
stock market that they do not control at all, and or dramatic reduction. Finally, energy is fading
that they do not even understand. because competition is stupid in the age of the
general intellect. The general intellect is not based
Future Exhaustion and Happy Frugality on juvenile impetus and male aggressivity-on
fighting, winning, and appropriation. It is based
Only if we're able to disentangle the future (the on cooperation and sharing.
perception and conception of the future, and the This is why the future is over, and we are living
very production of it) from the traps of growth in a space that is beyond the future, If we are able
and investment, will we find an escape from the to come to terms with this postfuturistic condi-
vicious subjugation of life, wealth, and pleasure to tion, we'll renounce accumulation and growth,
the financial abstraction of semio-capital. and will be happy in sharing the wealth from our
80 T•·, Ur:.••s n?. On Pco:lrl and F.nar.o:.e Language. Economy, an:l tr··e 8o)Qy I 8 1
past of industrial labor and from our present of semio-capitalism was a shift in the perception of
collective intelligence. the relation between money, language, and time.
If we are nor able to do this, we will be doomed This is my starting point: the relation between
to a century of violence, misery, and war. time, money, and language. I say that when you
talk about banks, you're talking about storing ti me.
But all the possible ways of storing and investing are
TIME, MONEY, AND LANGUAGE each linked to changes in the history of capitalism,
and also in the history of the relationship between
Storing Time capitalism and our life, subjectivity, and singularity.
It's quite difficult to be systematic about time,
Think about the following sentences: so I will not try to be systematic. I will try to find
some reference points that may help us understand
"Give me rime." something about our present. What is happening
"You're wasring your time here." in our present, from the point of view of time, lan-
"I need more rime." guage, and events? Well, let's have a look at the
European landscape. You see how sad the
These sentences are meaningless, as they presup- European landscape is today.
pose that rime is something than can be given or I noticed that fact several days ago at the Berlin
withdrawn, and imply that time is something that airport. I was there waiting for my flight, and I saw
can be gained or lost, possessed and stored. an old couple with smiling faces looking at the
It is on this kind of absurdity that the economy timetable, and also a young punk girl with tattoos.
is based, a technology aimed at the reification and Everybody looked happy except me. I was the only
the accumulation of time. sad person in the Berlin airport. I had my own
Timebank is a sort of tautology, because banks personal reasons to be sad-that's not what I want
are essentially about time. What do you store in a to talk about. What is relevant here is that I am
bank? You store time. In a sense, you are storing European and not German.
your past, and you are also storing your future. Take the Greeks, for instance. You know how
The essential transformation in the passage from sad they are, and also how desperate, and angry,
modern bourgeois capitalism to contemporary too. But when you do not see any hope in your
82 I The Upns•ng: On Poetry and Finance Language. Economy. and tile Bocly I 83
present situation, you're angry and desperate.
And the Greeks are angry and desperate. And so
one. It will become a truth. An enigma is different,
because you cannot find a key. The key is nowhere,
-
are rhe Portuguese, nor to mention the Irish. They and also the truth is nowhere. So, when we speak
were happy some years ago, and now, suddenly, about fi nancial capitalism, when we argue abo ut
rhey are in a different mood-as are all Europeans, the relation between time and fut ure and debt,
except Germans. are we speaking of a secret, or are we speaking of
Do you know why? Because German banks are an enigma?
full of our time. That's the problem. T he German I think we are sp eaking of an enigma, because
banks have stored Greek rime, Portuguese time, nobody knows about the future, nobody knows
Italian time, and Irish time, and now rhe German what is hidden in the future rime of debtors. So the
banks are asking for their money back. They have only way to solve t his enigma is with violence.
stored the futures of the Greeks, the Portuguese, Either you pay, or you are our. Either you give
the Italians, and so on. D ebt is actually future your present rime as payment for rhe fut ure rime
time-a promise about the future. Greeks have rhar you have stored in German banks, or you'll
been obliged to promise away their future time, become poor. So in order to avoid being expelled
and they have stored rhar promise in German from the European Union, the Greeks and rhe
banks. Portuguese and others are obliged to become poor.
Something is wrong with this exchange. You Recession, impoverishment, misery: this is the way
take my (future) time, and then want my money we are paying for our (imaginary) futu re: debt.
back. The crucial mystery, the crucial enigma,
rhe crucial secret in the financial age of capitalism Floating Values
is precisely this: is the money that is stored in the
bank my past time, (the rime that I have spent in Yo u cannot find truth in financial capitalism,
the past), or is it the money that ensures the possi- because the essential tool of financial capitalism is
bility of my buying a future? Well, is it a secret or this: truth has disappeared, dissolved. It's no longer
an enigma? there. T here is no more truth, only an exchange of
A secret is something that is hidden somewhere. signs, only a deterritorialization of meaning. In
You have to know rhe password, you have to find Symbolic Exchange and Death, a book p ublished in
rhe right key, and then rhe secret will no longer be 1976, Jean Baudrillard says that rhe whole system
84 I TI:e Upns1ng: On Poetry and FimncE: Lan\)uag;,, Economy, and the Booy 1 85
is falling into indeterminacy. This is the essential When you want to establish the average time
shift from industrial capitalism to semio-capitalism: that is needed to produce a material object, you
indeterminacy takes the place of the fixed relation just have to do a simple calculation: how much
between labor-time and value, so that the whole physical labor time is needed to turn matter into
regime of exchange falls into an aleatory system of that good. It's easy to state this, to decide how
floating values. much time is needed to produce a material object.
Financial capitalism is essentially based on the But try to decide how much time it takes to produce
loss of relation between time and value. an idea. Try to decide how much time is necessary
In the first pages of Capital, Marx explains that to produce a project, a style, an innovation. Well,
value is time, the accumulation of time. Time you see that when the process of production
objectified, time that has become things, goods, becomes semiotic, the relationship between labor-
and value. But be careful: not just any kind of time and value suddenly evaporates, dissolves into
time is relevant in the determination of value, but thin air. Baudrillard was the first thinker who
the average social time that is needed to produce a understood and described this passage.
certain good. If you are lazy, or too fast, that does Baudrillard wrote Symbolic Exchange and
not matter. What is important in the determination Death in 1976 . But some years before that, US
of value is the average time that is needed to pro- President Richard Nixon did something that
duce a certain good. This was true in the good old changed the world. The presidents of the US in
days when it was possible to determine the time those times were like prophets, not because they
that was needed to produce something. Then predicted the future zeitgeist, but because they
things changed: all of a sudden, something new were powerful enough to imprint their will, or
happened in the organization of work, and in pro- the will of American capitalism, onto the future.
duction technology, in the relation between time, And Nixon did something very, very important
work, and value. Suddenly, work is no longer the as far as changing the future went. Well, he
physical, muscular work of industrial production. decided to free the dollar from the gold standard.
There are no longer material things, but signs; no He decided that the gold-standard system and
longer the production of things which are tangible the Bretton Woods system, based on a fixed relation
visible materials, but the production of something between different currencies, was over. Since then,
that is essentially semiotic. the dollar has been free from any fixed standard.
86 / Tile Upns,ng: On Poetry and Finance Langu3ge. Economy, and the Body / 87
Independent, autonomous-or better, aleatory. at the end of this chapter. But first I want to say
Floating, undetermined. something now about time, forgetting, and the
Something aleatory is something that cannot be bank, if I can.
predicted, fixed, or determined in any way. Latin
uses the word ratio in order to describe the fixed Fascism Femininity Futurism
relationship, the standard, the measure. And in
philosophical parlance, ratio refers to the universal We are accustomed-! say "we," meaning my
standard of understanding things: reason. generation, the last modern generation-we are
After Nixon's decision, measurement ended. accustomed to thinking about time in terms of
Standardization ended. The possibility of deter- progress, an endless process of growth, and also in
mining the average amount of time necessary to terms of perfectibility.
produce a good ended. Of course, that means that The old, modern conception of futurity is
the United States of America, its president, crucial in understanding the way modernity has
Richard Nixon, decided that violence would take the thought about time. The best definition of modern
place of measurement. In conditions of aleatority, time you can find is in Marinetti's manifesto of
what is the condition of the final decision? What is 1909, "The Futurist Manifesto." Time is crucial to
the action or process of determining value? "The Futurist Manifesto." Even, when the futurists
Strength, force, violence. What is the final way of speak of despising "the woman," they are also
deciding something-for instance, deciding the speaking about time.
exchange rate of the dollar? Violence, of course. What is time in "The Futurist Manifesto"? The
Give me time. manifesto understands time as acceleration, and
The conjuncture between violence and the views acceleration as a process of increasing potency.
financialization of capitalism is not a casual and This conception of acceleration is new in the
extemporaneous one. It's absolutely structural. There history of thought and in the history of art. The
can be no financial economy without violence, idea that one's perception of time can be changed
because violence has now become the one single was already there in Impressionism and in
method of decision in the absence of the standard. Cezanne, but only in the sense of deceleration, in
I will here pause in my elaboration of financial the sense of a becoming-slow of vision. Let's us not
capitalism, but I want to come back to this subject forget that Cezanne has a lot to do with Henri
88 I Tt1e Upnsing: On Poetr; and Ftn3nce Language. Economy, and the Body / 89
Bergson, who translated the concept of time into acceleration and we must not forget that Italian
the concept of duration. Bergson speaks of time in modernity was very concerned with the problem
terms of perception, not extension. This is why of the masculinization of perception: of time, of
Bergson is the philosopher who best interprets politics, of power.
impressionist and symbolist poetics, as well as One cannot understand Italian fascism if one
those of futurism. Because Bergson was offering a doesn't start from the need for a defeminization of
new perspective on time; he was speaking of time cultural self-perception. Italian fascism is based on
in terms of subjective duration, not in terms of the despising the woman. Contempt for the woman is
universal category of the human mind. one of the crucial points of "The Futurist
This is the crucial change from the classical age Manifesto," but it's also one of the crucial points of
of bourgeois representation to the late-modern the creation of the ridiculous, miserable national
crisis and proliferation of viewpoints and streams pride of the Italians. Italians h ave always regarded
of perception and consciousness. themselves from a feminine perspective. The great-
The possibility of different intensities in temporal ness ofltalian culture is femininity, Mediterranean
perception was introduced by Bergson and sweetness, taste for life, tenderness, and slowness.
Cezanne, but especially by Marinetti and the If you read Italian poetry- Dante, Petrarch,
Italian futurists. Torquato Tasso, Giacomo Leopardi, Ugo Foscolo--
While the Russian futurists were more interested it always speaks of Italy as a beautiful woman, as a
in time from the point of view of their literary feminine body, sometimes a wounded or suffering
and artistic production but were less explicit in one (Petrarch: My Italy, though words cannot heal I
their poetics declarations, Italian futurists were The m01tal wounds I So dense, I see on your lovely
trying to speak about time from the point of flesh ... ), but also one with a feeling of pleasure and
view of acceleration. And they said something brightenjng. When being Italian was not shameful
that Paul Virilio has fully explained in h is late- like it is today, Italy's self-identification was feminine.
century books: velocity and acceleration are the T hen something happened: nationalism, war,
modern tools of potency; industrial, political, industrial competition arrived, and the main con-
and military potency are based on velocity in the cern of Italian national culture became destroying
late-modern age. Masculine potency is essentially this feminine self-perception, and affi rm ing
perceived by Italian futurists as a problem of aggressivity and ludicrous masculinity: fascism is
90 I TI1e LJo,is ng: On Poetry and F nan::e Language. Economy, ar j ihs Bod1 / 91
the turning point from feminine self-perception to become a true man. That kind of hysteria, the
masculine assertiveness. In the nineteenth century, ridiculous, crazy, murderous hysteria of Italian and
Italian national culture became ashamed of the Japanese fascism, comes as a consequence of the
peaceful femininity of Mediterranean people, denial and forced obliteration of the feminine side
and began inoculating itself with testosterone. of those cultures.
The result is a farcical show of aggressivity that is Italian futurism is a good essential introduction
perfectly embodied by such murderous, cowardly to the twentieth century, because the twentieth
clowns as Mussolini and Berlusconi. century can be defined as the century that trusted
When you speak of German fascism, it's not fake. in the future. Futurism asserted the idea that the
It's not ridiculous, it's not funny. It's criminal, future was the better dimension of time, not the
murderous, horrible, but not funny. But there is past. When in fact, futurism is all about the
something that sounds false in Italian history. destruction of the past, and the emphasis on and
National pride, military aggressivity, industrial glorification of the future.
growth, and so on: all this is fake. This is why Italian Now the glory of the future is over. We no
fascism is often perceived as a farce, when unfornma- longer trust the future, as the futurists-and the
tely it was not. It was a farce, but a tragic and criminal moderns, in general-did. What has happened?
farce, that provoked war, death, and devastation.
As far as time goes, Italian fascism was about 1977
forgetting laziness, slowness, and Mediterranean
sensitivity, and affirming a different perception of I want to focus on the crucial year 1977. I think
time, one based on acceleration. that 1977 is especially important for many reasons.
The feminine perception of]apanese identity is, Don't forget that 1977 is the year when Charlie
in many ways, similar to the Italian one. And the Chaplin dies. The death of that man, in my per-
modernization of the Meji restoration was based ception, represents the end of the possibility of a
first of all on the defeminization of Japanese gentle modernity, the end of the perception of
culture. Think, for instance, of the elimination of time as a contradictory, controversial place where
women in the environment of the emperor. From different viewpoints can meet, conflict, and then
one day to the next, after 1870, women disappear find progressive agreement. Charlie C haplin is the
and warriors appear, and the emperor has to last man of modern times-the age of the
92 1 The Uprising: On Poetly and Finance Language, Economy. and the Bc{ly I 93
machine, the horrible machine, coming into daily violence is decisive. Beginning in 1977, the word
life and destroying daily life, but also the age of "competition" becomes the crucial term for econo-
social conflict, of social consciousness, of solidarity. mists. I don't know if economics can be considered
Charlie Chaplin is the man on the watch tower, a science. I don't think it can. I think it is a technol-
looking at the city from a perilous vantage point, ogy. It is a technology whose aim is the transforma-
looking at the city of time, but also at the city tion of time into labor, and labor-time into value,
where time can be negotiated and governed. and the transformation of our relation with nature
In 1977, C harlie Chaplin died. But I also into one of scarcity, need, and consumption.
want to remember that 1977 is the year when But since 1977, the project of the science of
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, in their small economics (or technology, I don't know) is the sub-
garage in Silicon Valley, created the user-friendly mission of human relationships to one single goal:
interfaces for the digital acceleration and mandatory competition, competition, competition. Now
unification of time. The Apple trademark was "competition" has become a natural word, a normal
registered in 1977. word. This is not right, because "competition"
That same year, the Metropolitan Indians rioted means violence, war.
in the streets of Rome and Bologna; and on the This is the meaning of competition. Otherwise,
banks of the Thames in the Queen's Jubilee, a you forget the meaning of words. You forget that
group of young British musicians for the first time competition equals war. Deleuze and G uattari, in
cried no future. Don't think about your future. You A Thousand Plateaus, cry to define fascism, and
don't have one. What Sid Vicious and the other they say: fascism is when a war machine is hidden
Sex Pistols screamed and declared in 1977 was the in every niche, when in every nook and in every
final premonition of the end of modern times, the cranny of daily life a war machine is hidden. This
end of industrial capitalism, and the beginning of is fascism.
a new age, which is an age of total violence: financial So I would say that neoliberalism is the most
globalization, deregulation, total competition, perfect form of fascism, in terms of Deleuze and
infinite war. Guattari's definition. Competition is the conceal-
If capitalism wants to continue to exist in the ment of a war machine in every niche of daily life:
history of mankind, then the history of mankind the kingdom of competition is fascism perfected.
has to become a site of total violence, because only
94 I TI1e Up:ising: On Poetry and F:nance Language, Economy. and the Body I 95
Semio-inflation then acceleration enters another phase, another
dimension. Increasing productivity in the sphere
I want to say something about semio-inflation, of semio-capitalism is essentially a problem of
about the special kind of inflation that happens in accelerating the infosphere.
the field of information, of understanding, of In the sphere of semio-capital, if yo u want to
meaning, and of affection. increase productivity, what you have to do is
William Burroughs said that inflation is essen- accelerate the infosphere, the environment where
tially when you need more money to buy less information races toward the brain.
things. I say that semio-inflation is when you need What happens, then, to our brain-to the
more signs, words, and information to buy less social brain? Cognition takes time. Think of what
meaning. It is a problem of acceleration. It is a attention is. Attention is the activation of physical
kind of hyperfuturism when the old accelerative reactions in the brain, and also of emotional,
conception of the future is the crucial tool for the affective reactions. Attention cannot be infinitely
capitalist goat. accelerated. This is why the new economy has
Karl Marx has already said something similar. failed, at the end of the 1990s, after a long period
When Marx speaks of productivity, and of rela- of constant acceleration.
tive surplus value, he's speaking about accelera- At the beginning of the last decade, in the year
tion. H e says that, if you want to obtain a growth 2000, the dot-com crash was the consequence of an
in productivity, which is also a growth in surplus overexploitation of the social brain. After the explo-
value, you need to accelerate work time. But at a sion of the Internet bubble, suddenly several books
certain point acceleration steps and jumps to about the attention economy appeared in bookstores.
another dimension, to what Baudrillard would All of a sudden, the economists became aware
call hyperacceleration. of the simple fact that the market of the semio-
The acceleration of productivity in the sphere capitalist world is a market of attention. Market
of industrial production is about intensifying the and attention had become the same thing. The
rhythm of the machine so that workers are forced crisis of 2000, the dot-com crash, was the effect of
to move faster in manipulating physical matter an overproduction in the field of attention.
and producing physical things. When the main Marx speaks of an overproduction crisis: if
tool of production begins to be cognitive labor, you produce too much of a certain good, people
96 I Ths Upns1ng: On Pcet•Y ar.d Finance Language. Economy. anj the Bod;' 1 97
cannot buy all those things, and the goods will Collapse
remain in the stores, unsold. So, the capitalist
begins firing workers, because he does not need any Do you remember the night of the turn of the cen-
more production, and this worsens the situation. tury, when everybody was waiting for the Y2K
This is the overproduction crisis in the framework bug? I was in front of my TV, waiting for the final
of industrial capitalism. What is the overproduction collapse, and nothing happened. Nothing. It was
crisis when we enter the phase of semio-capital? the most horrible night of my life. I had staked all
The overproduction lies in the relation between the my credibility on promising everyone that that night
amount of semiotic goods produced by cognitive would be the final one of our lives, and nothing
labor and the amount of time that is disposed of. happened at all, nothing. But there was an expec-
A society's total quantity of attentive time is not tation of collapse in the air. How can we explain
boundless, because attention cannot be accelerated that expectation?
past a limit. One can accelerate one's attention; The collapse did not have to do with the mil-
one can take amphetamines, for instance. We have lennium bug. The collapse represented the fall of
techniques and drugs that give us the capability of the Prozac-fueled excitement in the social brain of
being more productive in the field of attention. But the cognitive workers all over the world. When
we know the problem with that. You know how it Alan Greenspan, in those months, said, "I feel an
ends. The 1990s were the dot-corn era, the age of irrational exuberance in the markets," he was not
increasing productivity, increasing enthusiasm for speaking about the economy. He was speaking
production, increasing happiness of intellectual about the Prozac crash . He was speaking about
workers. But the 1990s were also the decade of the end of the cocaine high in the social brain of
Prozac mania. One cannot understand what Alan millions of cognitive workers.
Greenspan calls "irrational exuberance" without What happened next? Well, the next step was
taking into account the simple fact that millions of an overproduction crisis in the field of semio-
cognitive workers took tons of cocaine, ampheta- capitalism . In the first years of the century-2000,
mine, and Prozac during the 1990s. 2001-the problem was the perception of the
This can work for a time, and then it ends. All of coming collapse of capitalism, of the world economy.
a sudden, from one day to the next, after the excite- Then September 11th arrived, and overproduction
ment and the acceleration, comes the apocalypse. became the solution to everything. Only a mad
98 1 The Upris1ng: On Poetry and F1nance Lar.guage, Economy, anc! tl<e Booy I 99
doctor would prescribe amphetamine to a depressed
r which has increasingly penetrated every recess of
person, to a depressed organism. But that is exactly daily life, every space of the social brain.
what happened after September 11th. T he cogni- The techno-linguistic machine is giving language
tive workers' organism, depressed for chemical and to human beings, and also raking the place of human
economic reasons, was submitted to the ampheta- beings in language for the current generation.
minic therapy of war by the mad doctor George The first generation that learned more words
Bush. The doctor was mad, and the result of this is from a machine than from their mothers has a
now here: the infinite war. problem concerning the relationship between
Doctor Bush did not want to win the war. H e words and the body, between words and affection.
was totally indifferent to winning or losing the The separation of language learning from the body
war. It was so eviden t that starting a war in a place of the mother and from the body in general is
like Afghanistan, with an ally like Pakistan, is changing language itself, and is changing the rela-
crazy, and a surefire way to lose. But the problem tion between language and the body. As far as we
was not one of winning or losing: the problem know, throughout human history access to lan-
concerned starting a war that would never end. guage has always been mediated by trust in the
Infinite war is a sign of the kind of craziness that mother's body. T he relation between the signifier
is a symptom of the inflation of meaning. More and the signified has always been guaranteed by
and more signs are buying less and less meaning. the body of the mother, and therefore by the body
What does one need when experiencing semio- of the other.
inflation, when the infosphere starts moving faster I know that water is "water" (actually, since I
and faster, and one's attention is unable to follow? learned from my mother how to speak in Italian, I
What is needed is some sort of dispositive to make know that acqua is "acqua'') because my mother, not
things easier, a dispositive to reduce the speed of a machine, told me "this is acqua." I know that the
the infosphere. It is a problem of time, acceleration, signifier points to the signified. My mother told me
and deceleration: it is a problem of easification. acqua, and I trust her body. What happens to the
The end of modernity began with the collapse relation between language and desire when access to
of the future, with Sid Vicious screaming no future. language is disconnected from the body?
But postmodern history, as far as we have known, When the relation between the signifier and the
has been the history of a techno-linguistic machine signified is no longer guaranteed by the presence of
100 I Tile Uprising: On Poetry and Fu1an::e Language. Economy. and the Bocly / 101
3
the body, my affective relation to the world starts
to be disturbed. My relation to the world becomes
functional, operational-faster, if you will, but
THE GENERAL INTELLE CT IS LOOKING
precarious. This is the point where precariousness
starts. At the point of disconnection between FOR A BODY
language and the body.
103
102 I The Upns1ng On Poet1y ancl Finance
if his work is producing chickens or books or cars ... beings to debt, and through predation on existing
He cares only about this: how much value his work resources. The destruction of the real world starts
can produce in a given unit of time. This is the from this emancipation of valorization from the
beginning of the process of capitalist abstraction. production of useful things, and from the self-
In the late-modern phase of capitalism, digital replication of value in the financial field. The
abstraction adds a second layer to capitalist emancipation of value from the referent leads to
abstraction: transformation and production no the destruction of the existing world. This is exactly
longer happen in the field of bodies, and material what is happening under the cover of the so-called
manipulation, but in the field of interoperativity financial crisis, which is not a crisis at all.
between informational machines. Information In his book Data TrdSh (1994), Arthur Kroker
takes the place of things, and the body is cancelled and Michael A. Weinstein write that in the field of
from the field of communication. digital acceleration, more information means less
We then have a third level of abstraction, which meaning. In the sphere of the digital economy, the
is financial abstraction. Finance means that the faster information circulates, the faster value is
process of valorization no longer passes through accumulated. But meaning slows down this
the stage of use value, or even the production of process, as meaning needs time to be produced and
goods (physical or semiotic). to be elaborated and understood. So the acceleration
In the old industrial economy described by of the info-flow implies an elimination of meaning.
Marx, the goal of production was already the In the sphere of the financial economy, the
valorization of capital, through the extraction of acceleration of financial circulation and valoriza-
surplus value from labor. But in order ro produce tion implies an elimination of the real world. The
value, the capitalist was still obliged to exchange more yo u destroy physical things, physical
useful things; he was still obliged to produce cars resources, and the body, the more you can accelerate
and books and bread. the circulation of financial flows.
When the referent is cancelled, when profit is In Greek, parthenos means virgin. Jesus Christ
made possible by the mere circulation of money, was created by parthenogenesis. T he Virgin Mary
the production of cars, books, and bread become gave birth ro her son without any engagement in
superfluous. The accumulation of abstract value is the reality of sex. The financial economy (like con-
made possible through the subjection of human ceptual art) is a parthogenetic process. Actually, the
104 I The Upris,ng: On Poetry and F1nance TI•e General Intellect Is Looking for a Body I 105
monetization and financialization of the economy cognitive processes of learning, speaking, imagining,
represent a parrhogenizarion of the creation of and memorizing are affected.
value. Value does nor emerge from a physical In the sphere of neoliberal capitalism, because
relationship between work and things, but rather of the capture of feminine nervous and physical
from rhe self-replication of the parrhogeneric force energies by the machinary of global exploitation,
of finance. mothers are less and less the source of language:
As M aurizio Lazzarato points out in his book they are separated from the bodies of children by
The Making ofthe Indebted Man, labor is no longer salaried labor, by rhe networked mobilization of
dominated by the physical force of power, but by their mental energies, and also by the globalization
rhe abstract force of finance: debt. of the affective marker. Millions of women leave
Digital abstraction leads ro the virrualizarion of their children in Manila and Nairobi and go to
the physical act of meeting, and the manipulation New York or London to look after the children of
of things. Financial abstraction leads to the separa- cognitive workers who leave their own children at
tion of rhe circulation of money from the produc- home to go to offices.
tion process of value itself. M others are replaced by linguistic machines that
These new levels of abstraction nor only con- are constantly talking and showing. The connective
cern the labor process-they encompass every generation is learni ng language in a framework
space of social life. Digitalization and financializarion where the relation between language learning and
have been transforming the very fabric of rhe social the affective body rends to be less and less relevant.
body, and inducing mutations. What are the long-term effects of this separa-
The process of production is merging in the tion of language from the mother's body? What
infosphere, and rhe acceleration of productivity is are the long-term effects of the automation of
transforming into an acceleration of the information language learning?
flows. Mental disorders and psychopathologies are I have no final answers to these questions, and
symptoms of this dual process of virtual derealization we cannot yet draw final conclusions about the
and acceleration. self-consciousness of the fi rst connective genera-
Digital abstraction, and the virrualization of tion, which is now entering the scene of the world.
social communication in general, has so deeply The movements erupting in Europe and in the Arab
transformed rhe social environment that the world may be the first glimpses of a long-term
106 I TI1e Upnstng: On Poewy and Fn1a11ce Tt1e General lnte1 1ect Is Locktng iot a Botly I 107
process of self-organization by the precarious, desire has been invaded by anxiogenous flows: the
connective generation around the world. Who acceleration of the infosphere has expanded expecta-
knows what the future holds? tions, semiotic stimulation , and nervous excitement
Over the last decade psychosocial research and up to the point of collapse.
the phenomenology of art, cinema, and novels has
revealed a growing fragility of the affective relation, Desire and Money
and an increase in mental pathologies: attention
deficit disorders, depression, panic, and suicidal Desire and money have a controversial relation.
behavior have been rising in the collective experience Money is about buying; desire is about creating.
of the new generation. Deleuze and Guarrari's decisive move, going back
The literary and artistic phenomenology of the to their first collaboration, Anti-Oedipus, was to
first decade of this century has told a story of draw a conceptual distinction between desire and
creeping disease in the psychosphere. The need. Desire should not be seen as a condition of
Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, Elephant by Gus scarcity, of manque; rather, it has to be seen as an
Van Sant, Time by Kim Ki Duk, The Social enhancer of vision, as a creative activity.
Network by David Fincher, No One Belongs Here When money takes the lead in the psychic
More Than You by Miranda July, We Have a Pope investment of society-as in the aftermath of the
by Nanni Moretti-to name just some of the neoliberal triumph- desire takes a paradoxical
books and films that seem to me to have grasped turn and starts to produce need, scarcity, and
the innermost sentiment of the decade-all display misery. The effect of fin ancial abstraction is the
a landscape of psychic breakdown. constant deterri torialization of desire. In the traps
In their book Les passions tristes (The sad pas- of advertising and consum erism, desire is dragged
sions), Miguel Benasayag and Gerard Schmit retrace into a relation of dependence with the fi nancial
their experience as psychoanalysts who have been machine. In the 1990s, the credit card system
working for many years in the banlieux of Paris invested American desire, opening the way to the
among young people. In their account, the very deceptio n of boundless consumption. T he eco-
perception of the future has changed among the nomic investment of desire was the original
young banlieusards, in that the future is no longer fo unt of the virtual economy in the 1990s, and
conceived as promise, bur as a threat. T he field of then the explosion of the dot-com bubble in
108 /lre Upns1ng: On Poetry and F1nance Tne Ger>erallnte"ect Is Lvcivr.g rc.: a &YJy / 109
2000 precipitated a short-circuiting of desire into society in order to extract surplus value from
panic and depression. workers. The revenue of the financial class, on the
Since September 2008, Americans have been contrary, is not linked to the actual enrichment of
suffering the backlash: unemployment, urban the territory, of the city, of the bourg. When the
misery, social spending cuts, infrastructure decay. bourg goes global, the bourgeoisie disappears, and
The financial ideology is thriving in the context bourgeois morality dissolves. The bourgeois
of social precariousness. When the prospects are unconscious was based on the separation of work
uncertain, you are invited to bet on the future. and desire, on repression of the sexual drive and
Lottery, net trading, risk-taking- these are the postponement of pleasure.
opportunities financial capitalism is offering every- At the end of the bourgeois era, in the after-
body. Bubbles grow, then bust, and the vast majority math of financial capitalism's triumph, desire
of people lose their money. You can use your credit invades the space of the market, and the market
card to its limit and beyond, betting on future invades the space of desire. Work and self-realiza-
revenues that will not arrive. You are debtor to a tion have to merge in the new economic vision:
bank that is thriving thanks to your being individuals have to become free agents. There is no
deceived. Transforming desire into need, the longer a distinction between life time and work
financial investment of desire paves the way to time: all of your time has to be devoted to earning
dependency and misery. money, as money has taken the place of desire.
The modern bourgeoisie was a strongly territo- As the Italian psychoanalyst Massimo Recalcati
rialized class, linked to material assets; they were a has pointed out in L 'uomo senza inconscio (Man
class acutely conscious of their relation with terri- without unconscious; 201 0), in the finanical era
tory and community. Their wealth and prosperity the social unconscious explodes, as it is every-
were based on the ownership of physical assets: where. Deterritorialization becomes the perpetual
factories, houses, goods stored in warehouses. The condition of money and of desire.
well-being of workers was essential to the creation The financial class that dominates the contem-
of a mass market and the thriving of bourgeois porary scene has neither attachments to territory
capitalism. nor to material production, because its power and
The industrial bourgeoisie exploited workers wealth are founded on the total abstraction of a
with the goal of developing society, and developed digitally multiplied finance. This digital-financial
110 Th:: Up·,s•ng. On Pcetr:f and F.roaC~ce The General Intellect Is Lookn1g tor a Body 1 111
hyperabstraction is liquidating both the living and separated from financial power, and finally
body of the planet and the social body. consigned to the role of a precarious work force.
One of the most important effects of the Internet The digital mobilization of desire, the accelera-
in the economy has been the diffusion of online tion of the infosphere, the overloading of collective
trading among young professionals and cognitive attention, and an overuse of psychopharmaceutical
workers: this countless proliferation of investors stimulants were the psychic triggers of the dot-com/
ensures the impossibity of finding a relationship Prozac crash, and that crash opened the door to the
between personal responsibility and the social disempowerment of cognitive labor. The disman-
effects of an investment. More and more often, tling of the general intellect began in the agonies of
the economic stake of a financial investment is the dot-com Prozac crash. The euphoric decade of
negative, destructive of concrete resources. You C linton's imperial illusion gave way to a decade of
can bet on the closure of a factory, the firing of infinite war, global terror, and suicide. The financial
workers, the death of people; you can bet on the collapse of 2008 is the predictable conclusion of this
spread of a disease. The financial economy can age of financial Ersatz, but the financial class does
act, and is acting more and more, as a counter- not want to recognize the failure, and a dangerous
productive force, as the accumulation of money is doubling-down on neoliberal monetarist policies is
becoming completely abstracted from the actual being enforced everywhere around the world.
creation of use-value. The ideology that fostered the Internet in the
When the dot-com economy crashed in the first 1990s was based on a premise of infinite energy,
months of 2000, many thought that the virtual infinite expansion, infinite resources. The old
world was doomed to decay. Actually, things have economy-the economy of the old industrial
turned out differently: the nonexistent world times-was based on a premise of scarcity, as it was
evoked by digital technology has not dissolved, the based on material resources that could be exhausted.
Internet is here to stay, and the virtualization of The new economy, instead, was envisioned as a
social communication did not stop in 2000. long, unending boom by Peter Schwartz and Peter
But in 2000, the dot-com crash marked an Leyden, the Wired ideologues. This idea was based
irreversible turn in the social relation between finan- on the premise of the infinite potency of the net.
cial capital and cognitive work. Cognitarians, who Because the net is an ever-expanding sphere of
had been able to create enterprise, were disowned im material substance (information), because
11 2 1 The Uprising: On Poetry ancl F•nance The General lntel•e,~t Is Looi<lng for a Body I 113
intellectual productivity is not limited by material excellent movie, The Social Network. The story is
constraints, the networked economy was expected about the creation and early diffusion of the social
to last forever and to provoke an everlasting expan- network Facebook, about one enterprise in the age
sion of market and value. of finan cial semio-capitalism. But the focus of the
Only one of these premises was true: the net movie shifts to the psychological side of the evolution
actually is an ever-expanding space, but the infinity of the Internet, in the context of the info-acceleration
of mental energy was an illusion. The wired ideology and stimulus-inten sification that broadband
has proven false because the ideologues did not technology has made possible. Love, friendship,
consider the limits of the subjective side of the affection- the whole sphere of emotionality is
econ omy. The attention market went into overload, invested by the intensification of the rhythm of
resulting in a semiotic overproduction. And the the infosphere.
global mind went crazy because individual brains Although the narrative concerns the beginnings
and individual bodies are not capable of limitlessly of Facebook, and the ensuing legal conflicts and
going faster and faster and faster. The exhaustibility trials correspond to the real story, biographical
of psychic resources is the intrinsic limit of the details in the film (for instance, the end of a love
cybersphere. The dream of the networked econo- affair in the first scene of the movie) are not neces-
my's endless boom broke because psychic energy is sarily factual, but are useful fo r a full understanding
not boundless, because the physical resources of the of the affective side of the social life of the cogni-
planet are not boundless, and because the infinite tarian labor force.
potency of the networked collective intelligence is The main ch aracter of the film, Mark Z ucker-
limited by the finitude of psychic energy. berg, may obviously be described as a winner: he is
the youngest billionaire in the world, and he owns
a company that in only a few years has become
IMPOSSIBLE FRIENDSHIP well-known worldwide with five-hundred million
(The Logic of Ersatz in Fincher's Facebook Movie) subscribers. Nonetheless, it is difficult to see him
as a happy person, and he can be described as a
Financial capitalism and precarious work, loneli- loser if yo u consider his rela tionships with
ness, suffering, and the atrophy of empathy and women and colleagues. Friendship seems impossible
sensibility: this is the subject of David Fincher's for him, and the success of his website is granted by
114 I T11e Up:is1ng: On Poetry and F1nance n·e G9n8ral lnte!lect Is Loo•mg fo· a B0d1• 1 115
the artificial substitution (Ersatz) of friendship and miserable energies of collective loneliness and frus-
love with standardized protocols. Existential unhap- tration. The origin al idea for the website came
piness and commercial success can be viewed as two from two rich Harvard twins named Tyler and
sides of the same coin: Fincher's movie very skillfully Cameron Winklevoss, who wanted to hire
interprets the psychological needs of Zuckerberg's Zuckerberg as a programmer. Zuckerberg pretends
generation by portraying loneliness and affective to work for them, but actually takes hold of their
frustration as his intimate psycho-scape. idea, although he is much more capable than they
Desire is diverted from physical contact and are in terms of linking the project to the psychic
invested in the abstract field of simulated seduction, needs arising from contemporary alienation.
in the infinite space of the image. The boundless Did Zuckerberg steal the idea from these two
enhancement of disembodied imagination leads to undergraduates? Yes and no. Actually, in the network
the virtualization of erotic experience, infinite flight it's impossible to clearly distinguish the different
from one object to the next. Value, money, finan- moments of the valorization process, because the
cial excitement: these are the perfect forms of this productive force of the net is collective, while profits
virtualization of desire. The permanent mobiliza- are private. Here we find the irremediable contra-
tion of psychic energy in the economic sphere is diction between the collective intelligence of the net
simultaneously the cause and the effect of the virtu- and the private appropriation of its products,
alization of contact. The very word "contact" comes shaking the very foundation of semio-capitalism.
to mean the exact opposite of contact: not bodily The movie presents an interesting perspective
touch, not epidermic perception of the sensuous on life and work in the age of precarity. The word
presence of the other, but purely intellectual inten- "precarious" means aleatory, uncertain, unstable,
tionaliry, virtual cognizability of the other. It is hard and it refers not only to the uncertainty of the
to predict what sort of long-term mutation is labor relation, but also to the fragmentation of
underway in human evolution. As far as we know, time and the unceasing deterritorialization of the
this virtual investment of desire is currently pro- factors of social production. Both labor and capital,
voking a pathogenic fragilization of social solidarity in fact, no longer have a stable relation to territory
and a stiffening of empathic feeling. or community. Capital flows in the financial circuits,
The genius of Zuckerberg essentially consists in and enterprise is no longer based on territorialized
his ability to exploit the suffering of the crowd, the material assets, bu t on signs, ideas, information,
116 / Th; Uccs:nq: On Pceuy and F'nance The General Intellect Is Lool-ing for a Body 1 11 7
knowledge, and linguistic exchange. Enterprise is spends his work day is not dissimilar to the way his
no longer linked to terri tory and the work process employees spend theirs. T hey all sit in front of
is no longer based on a community of workers, computers and type on keyboards.
living together in a factory day after day, but T he main character of the movie-the
instead takes the form of an ever-changing recom- Zuckerberg portrayed by Fincher-has only one
bination of time fragments connected in the global friend : Edouard Severin, who becomes the
network. Cognitive workers do not meet in the financer of the initial Facebook enterprise. When
same place every day, but remain alone in their the growth of the enterprise demands new
networked cubicles, where they answer to the financers, Z uckerberg does not hesitate to betray
requests of ever-changing employers. The capitalist his only friend.
no longer signs agreements in order to exploit the T his is not only characteristic of personal rela-
productive energies of the worker during his overall tions in the financial world, but is unfortunately
working life. He no longer purchases the entire also characteristic of relations between workers.
availability of the worker. He hires a fragment of Although the movie portrays a billionaire, it also
available time, a fractal, compatible with the pro- tells the story of the social condition of labor: the
tocols of interfunctionality, and recombinable with impossibility of friendship in the present condition
other fragments of time. of the virtual abstraction of sociality, and the
Industrial workers experienced solidarity impossibility of building solidarity in a society that
because they met each other every day and were turns life into an abstract container of competing
members of the same living community who shared fragments of time.
the same interests, while the Internet worker is alone
and unable to create solidarity because everybody is
obliged to compete in the labor market and in the RESPIRATION, CONSPIRACY, AND SOLIDARITY
daily fight for a precarious salary. Loneliness and
lack of human solidarity not only characterize the Once upon a time, I happened to take part in an
situation of the worker, but also that of the entrepre- action of the Living T heater. In an old Italian theater,
neur. The border separating labor and enterprise is some hundred people met for a collective mantra:
confused in the sphere of cognitive work. Although an emission of harmonic sounds, shared breathing,
Mark Z uckerberg is a billionaire, the way he and shared sound which lasts in time thanks to a
118 I The Upris1ng: On Pcetry and F1nance n-e G~;nsral lnt51 1ectls Lc:::l-ing for a Booy I 119
vocal wave which goes from one mouth to the between conscious and sensmve organisms can
next, fro m one body to the next. I want to elabo- happen as conjunctive concatenations and also as
rate on the mantra as a form of composing the connective concatenations. Human beings conjoin
insurgent movement. thanks to their ability to linguistically and sensuously
Let's consider the social relation from the point of interact. The phenomenon of linguistic communica-
view of harmony and disharmony among breathing tion has been widely studied by scholars, and we
singularities. Organisms meet, conflict, interact in know that the media can modifY and enrich it, but
common space. The wisdom of the Hindu yogin also impoverish it.
conceives of individual breathing (atman) as a rela- There is another level of the concatenation, sen-
tion of the organism with cosmic breath (prana) and sibili ty, which sh ould be better understood.
the physical surrounding environment. Sensibility is the ability of the human being to
Physical organisms interact with the natural communicate what cannot be said with words.
environment, with the city, the factory, the air. Being available to conjunction, the social organism
l
Psychic organisms also interact with the infosphere, is open to affections, sensuous comprehension,
the environment where info-stimulae circulate, and social solidari ty. C ultural flows-music and
influencing psychic reactions. poetry, as well as psychotropic substances-can
In late-modern times, we experience a growing favor, or obstruct and pollute, conjunctive ability.
pollution of air, water, and food. Industrial fall out Sensibility is also the faculty that allows us to
is provoking an increase in asthma, lung cancer, enter into relation with entities not composed of
and respiratory diseases. But there is another kind our matter, not speaking our language, and not
of pollution which concerns the psychic breathing reducible to the communication of discreet, verbal,
of individual and collective organisms. Semiotic or digital signs.
flows which are spread in the infosphere by the Sensibility is the ability to harmonize with the
media system are polluting the psychosphere and rhizome.
provoking disharmony in the breathing of singu-
larities: fear, arudety, panic, and depression are the Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any
pathological symptoms of this kind of pollution. point of a rhizome can be connected to anything
Let's understand how singularities are linking in other, and must be. [... ] Collective assemblages of
the social-psychic becoming. Concatenations enunciation function directly wirhin machinic
120 I The Upns,ng: On Poetry and Finance T~e Ge~eral lnte :e.::tls L00'<'19 to· a Boo;· / 121
assemblages; it is not impossible to make a radical of intensities pushing the deterritorialization ever
break between regimes of signs and their objects. further. There is neither imitation nor resem-
[... ) The orchid deterritorializes by forming an blance, only an exploding of two heterogeneous
image, a tracing of a wasp; but the wasp reterri- series on the line of flight composed by a common
torializes on rhat image. The wasp is nevertheless rhizome that can no longer be attributed to or
dererritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid's subjugated by anything signifying. Remy
reproductive apparatus. But it reterritorializes the Chauvin expresses it well: "the apamllel evolution
orchid by transporting irs pollen. Wasp and of two beings that have absolutely nothing to do
orchid, as heterogeneous elements, form a rhi- with each other." (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 10)
zome. (Deleuze and G uattari 1987, 7- 10)
Conjunction/Connection
On the ontological, teleological , or even the
physical plane, the wasp and the orchid are not Conjunction and connection are rwo different
homogeneous. They even belong to rwo different modalities of social concatenation. Whilst con-
natural realms. But this does not prevent them junction means becoming-other, living, and the
from working together in the sense of becoming a unpredictable concatenation of bodies, connection
concatenation (s'agencer), and in so doing generating means the functional interoperability of organisms
something that was not there before. "Be, Be, Be!" previously reduced to compatible linguistic units.
is the metaphysical scream that dominates hierar- The spreading of the connective modality in
chical thought. Rhizomatic thought replies: social life (the nerwork) creates the condition of an
"Concatenate, C oncatenate, Concatenate!" anthropological shift that we cannot yet fully under-
The principle of becoming lies in conjunctive stand. This shift involves a mutation of the conscious
concatenation: organism: in order to make the conscious organism
compatible with the connective machine, its cogni-
... a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming- tive system has to be reformatted. Conscious and
orchid of the wasp. Each of these becomings sensitive organisms are thus being subjected to a
brings about the dererritorializarion of one term process of mutation that involves the faculties of
and the reterrirorialization of the other; the two attention, processing, decision, and expression. Info-
becomings interlink and form relays in a circulation flows have to be accelerated, and connective capacity
122 I Tha Ucrisw.g: On Poelr>' and F1nance TI1e General Intellect Is Looking for a Bod:! 1 123
has to be empowered, in order to comply with the insertion of the electronic in the organic- the pro-
recombinant technology of the global net. liferation of artificial devices in the organic universe,
In order to understand the present anthropo- the body, communication, and society. But the
logical shift, we should focus on the meaning of effect of this change is a transformation of the rela-
conjunction and connection. tionship between consciousness and sensibility, and
C onjunction is a becoming-other. In contrast, an increasing desensitization in the exchange of signs.
with connection each element remains distinct and Conjunction is the meeting and fusion of
interacts only functionally. Singularities change round and irregular shapes that are continuously
when they conjoin, they become something other weaseling their way about without precision, repe-
than what they were before their conjunction. tition, or perfection. Connection is the punctual and
Love changes the lover and the combination of repeatable interaction of algorithmic functions,
asignifying signs gives rise to the emergence of a straight lines, and points that overlap perfectly, and
previously nonexistent meaning. plug in or out according to discrete modes of inter-
Rather than a fusion of segments, connection action that render the different parts compatible to a
entails a simple effect of machinic functionality. T he preestablished standard. The shift from conjunction
functionality of the materials that connect is implicit to connection as the predominant mode of inter-
in the connection as a functional modeling that pre- action of conscious organisms is a consequence of
pares them for interfacing and interoperabUity. In the gradual digitalization of signs and the increasing
order for connection to be possible, segments must mediatization of relations.
be linguistically compatible. Connection requires a The digitalization of communicative processes
prior process whereby the elements that need to con- induces a sort of desensitization to the curve, the
nect are made compatible. Indeed, the digital web continuous process of gradual becoming; and a
extends through the progressive reduction of an sort of sensitization to the code, sudden changes of
increasing number of elements to a format, a standard, state, and series of discrete signs.
and a code that makes compatible different elements. Conjunction entails a semantic criterion of
The process of change underway in our time is interpretation. The other, who enters in conjunction
centered on the shift from conjunction to connec- with you, sends signs whose meanings you must
tion as the paradigm of exchange between conscious interpret, by tracing if necessary the intention, the
organisms. The leading factor of this change is the context, the shade, the unsaid.
124 I Tt1e Ur,."s'ng: On Poetry and F1nance The General Intellect Is Lcc"'ng for a Bc(iy I 125
Connection requires a criterion of interpreta- digital signs-can be useless and also dangerous in
tion that is purely syntactic. The interpreter must an integrated system of connective nature.
recognize a sequence and be able to carry out the Sensibility slows interpretation procedures, malcing
operation foreseen by the "general syntax" (or decodiflcation aleatory, ambiguous, and uncertain,
operating system); there can be no margins for and thus reducing the competitive efficiency of the
ambiguity in the exchange of messages, nor can the semiotic agent.
intention be manifest though nuances. The gradual The ethical dimension is involved in this
translation of semantic differences into syntactic process: a sort of ethical insensibility seems to mark
differences is the process that led from modern the behavior of the humans of the last generation.
scientific rationalism to cybernetics, and eventually But if we want to understand the disturbance in the
made the creation of a digital web possible. ethical sphere, we should displace our attention
But if you extend the syntactic method of inter- toward the aes thetic fleld. The ethical disorder,
pretation to human beings, a cognitive and psychic the inability to ethically manage individual and
mutation is underway. collective life, seem s to follow from a disturbance
This mutation is actually producing painful of the aesthesia, the perception of the other and
effects on the conscious organism, and these effects of the self.
can be interpreted with the categories of psycho-
pathology: dyslexia, anxiety and apathy, panic and Composition and Recombination
depression. However, pathological description does
not grasp the deep meaning of the question. What is When I say composition , I mean a form of
more important, in fact, is the conscious organism's shared respiration: cospiration, conspiracy, grow-
attempt to adapt to a changing environment. ing together, conjoined expectations, coalescing
In order to efficiently interact with the connective lifestyles.
environment, the conscious and sensitive organism When I say recombination, I mean compatibility
starts to suppress to a certain degree what we call and functional operativity.
sensibility. This is, in my opinion, the core of the When the relation between social components
cognitive reformatting that is underway. (individuals) is predominantly recombinant, the
Sensibility-i.e., the ability to interpret and social organism stiffens and gets frail: solidari ty
understand what cannot be expressed in verbal or becomes difficult.
126 I Tile Uprising: On Poetry and Finance The Ge'1erallnte'tect Is L•:-okong for a B<Xi)' I 127
Social solidarity is not an ethical or ideological sympathize weakens, and functional recombination
value: it depends on the continuousness of the happens on impersonal ground.
relation between individuals in time and in space. Disempathy is the consequence of this
The material foundation of solidarity is the per- disharmonization of social communication. The
ception of the continuity of the body in the body, sexuality of the fractal body is exposed in the
and the immediate understanding of the consistency form of panic, and desire is driven simultane-
of my interest and your interest. ously in countless directions, in the frigid orgy
The communist conspiracy, for instance, was of pornography.
the psychic and cultural energy that made solidarity
possible inside the social body of the industrial Rhythm and Refrain
worker class, notwithstanding the authoritarian
reality of communist realizations. Late-modern rhythm has been scanned by the
Since the 1980s, precarity has provoked a process ordered noise of the machine. Rock and punk
of desolidarization and disaggregation of the social music have inherited the knack for mechanical
composition of work. Virtualization has been a rhythm, although in the end they turn this gift
complementary cause of desolidarization: preca- into rage against the machine. In his book Sonic
rization makes the social body frail at the level of Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear
work, while virtualization makes the social body (20 10) , Steve Goodman describes the rhythmic
frail at the level of affection. aggression against social life:
Inside the precarious conditions of labor, col-
lective breath is fragmented, submitted to the From Hitler's use of the loudspeaker as a mecha-
accelerating rhythms of the virtual machine: the nism for affective mobilization during World War
fractal fragmentation of labor is parallel and II, through to Bin Laden's audio-taped messages,
complementary to the fractalization of financial the techniques of sonic warfare have now perco-
capital. Financial capitalism is deterritorialized and lated into the everyday. (Goodman 2002, 5)
virtual, and acts as a constant recombination of
virtual fragments of abstract ownership. In order to describe the relation between the sur-
Because of the introduction of the connective rounding soundscape and the traces of singularity,
principle in social communication, the ability to Guattari speaks of ritournelle, or refrain.
128 I The UDns.-,g: On Pcshy and Fonan:e ll1e GE'r~erallntel•ect Is Lwking tc.r a Bxi;' I 129
A child singing in the night because it is afraid T he m ain cultural transformation of modern capi-
of the dark seeks to regain control of events that talism has been the creation of refrains of temporal
deterritorialized too quickly for her liking and perception that pervade and discipline society: the
started to proliferate on the side of the cosmos refrain of factory work, the refrain of salary, the
and the Imaginary. Every individual, every refrain of the assembly line.
group, every nation is thus "equipped" with a The digital transition has brought along with it
basic range of incantatory refrains. (Guattari new refrains: electronic fragmentation, information
20 11 , 107) overload, acceleration of the semiotic exchange,
fractalization of time, competition.
The refrain is an obsessive ritual that allows the The essential feature of refrain is rhythm, and
individual- the conscious organism in continuous rhythm is a special configuration of the relation
variation-to find identification points, and to between singular refrain and universal chaos.
te rritorialize herself and to represent herself in
relation to the surrounding world. The refrain is Chaos is not the opposite of rhythm, but the
the modality of semiotization that allows an indi- milieu of all milieus. T here is rhythm whenever
vidual (a group, a people, a nation, a subculture, a there is a transcoded passage from one milieu to
movement) to receive and project the world accord- another, a communication of milieus, coordination
ing to reproducible and communicable formats. between heterogeneous space-times. (Deleuze
In order for the cosmic, social, and molecular and Guattari 1987, 345)
universe to be filtered through individual percep-
tion, semiotic filters must act, and we call them Rhythm is the relation of a subjective flow of signs
refrains. (musical, poetic, gestual signs) with the environment:
The perception of time by a society is shaped by the cosmic environment, earthly environment, social
social refrains. environment.
Rhythm is everywhere in social life. Work,
From this perspective, universal time appears to war, rituals, and social movements each have their
be no more than a hypothetical projection, a time special rhythm.
of generalized equivalence, a "flattened" capitalistic At the chaosmotic level, rhythm is the concate-
time. (Guattari 1995, 16) nation between breathing and the surrounding
130 I T11e Upns,ng: On Poetry and Finance The General intellect Is LcoJJng fer a Body / 131
universe. In Guattari's parlance, refrain is the only not surprise us; we should not condemn these acts
way of creating this concatenation, this agencement as criminal. For too long has financial dictatorship
between singularity and environment. compressed the social body, and the cynicism of
At the social level, rhythm is the relation the ruling class has become repugnant.
between the body and the social concatenation of The uprising is a therapy for this ki nd of psy-
language. chopathology.
The social environment is marked by refrains, The uprising is not a form of judgment, but a
repetitions of gestures and signs that simultaneously form of healing.
express the singular mode and the relation between And this healing is made possible by a mantra
the agency and the environment. that rises, stronger and stronger, as solidarity
resurfaces in daily life.
Mantra It is useless to preach a sermon to those who can
only express their revolt in a violent way. The
The uprising agai nst financial capitalism that began medic does not judge, but heals, and the task of
in the European countries in 20 11 can be seen as a the movement is to act as a medic, no t as a judge.
mantra, as an attempt to reactivate the conjunctive What we should be able to communicate to the
body, as a form of therapy on the disempathetic rioters, the looters, the black bloc, and the casseurs
pathologies crossing the social skin and social soul. is a truth that we have to build together and to
Upheaval, uprising, insurrection, and dots: spread: that a collective mantra chanted by millions
these words should not be used in a militaristic sense. of people will tear down the walls of Jericho much
The organization of violent actions by the anti- better than a pickaxe or a bomb.
capitalist movement would not be smart, as violence
is a pathological demonstration of impotence when
power is protected by armies of professional killers.
Nevertheless, we'll be witness to massive explosions
of precarious rage and violence, as in England in
August 2011, as in Rome on October 15th.
The uprising will frequently give way to phe-
nomena of psychopathic violence. These should
132 I n<e Upnsing: On Pc-et:y and F1nance Tr.e General Intellect Is Lcoking ror il Bo-:11 1 133
•, L :i'
.....
4 concrived to hold the beast in abeyance [... ]
Thus economics shares the language of psy-
chopathology, inflation, depression, lows and
POETRY A ND FIN ANCE heights, slumps and peaks, investmencs and loss-
es, and the economy remains caught in manipu-
lations of acting stimulated or depressed, drawing
attencion to itself, egotistically unaware of irs
own soul. Economists, brokers, accountants, fin-
anciers, all assisted by lawyers, are the priests of
EMANCIPATION OF THE SIGN : POETRY AND the cuit of money, reciting their prayers to make
FINANCE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY rhe power of money work without imagination.
(Sardello 1983, l -2)
Money and language have something in common:
they are nothing and they move everything. They are Financial capitalism is based on the autonomiza-
nothing but symbols, conventions, flatus vocis, but tion of the dynamics of money, but more deeply
they have the power of persuading human beings to on the autonomization of value production from
act, to work, to transform physical things. the physical interaction of things.
The passage from the industrial abstraction of
Money makes things happen. It is the source of work to the digital abstraction of world implies an
action in the world and perhaps the only power immaterialization of the labor process.
we invest in. Perhaps in every other respect, in Jean Baudrillard has proposed a general semiol-
every other value, bankruptcy has been declared, ogy of simulation based on the premise of the end
giving money the power of some sacred deity, of referentiality, in the economic as well as in the
demanding to be recognized. Economics no linguistic field. In The Mirror of Production,
longer persuades money to behave. Numbers Baudrillard writes: "need, use value, and the referent
cannot make the beast lie down and be quiet or 'do not exist.' T hey are only concepts produced
sit up and do tricks. Thus, as we suspected all and projected into a generic dimension by the
along, economics falsely imitates science. At best, developmen t of the very system of exchange
economics is a neurosis of money, a symptom value." (Baudrillard 1975, 30)
136 I The Upristng: On PoetJY and Ftnance Pcetry and Rn~nce I 137
models, according to the infin ite chains of simu- The structu ral dimension becomes autonomous
lation. (Baudrillard 1993, 3) by excluding the referential dimension, and is
instituted upon the death of reference [... ] from
The crucial point of Baudrillard's critique is that now on, signs are exchanged against each other
referentiality and the (in)determination ofvalue has rather than against the real (it is not that they just
come to an end. In the sphere of the market, things happen to be exchanged with each other, they do
are not considered from the point of view of their so on condition that they are no longer exchanged
concrete usefulness, but from chat of their against the real). The emancipation of the sign.
exchangeability and exchange value. Sim ilarly, in (Baudrillard, 1993, 6-7)
the sphere of communication, language is traded
and valued as something chat is performed. The emancipation of the sign from the referential
Effectiveness, not truth value, is the rule of lan- function may be seen as the general trend of late
guage in the sphere of communication. Pragmatics, Modernity, the prevailing tendency in literature
not hermeneutics, is the methodology for under- and art as in science and in policies.
standing social communication, particularly in the In the following pages I want to retrace the
age of new media. evolution of poetry in the passage from romantic
Retracing the process of dereferentialization in realism to symbolist transrealism.
both semiotics and economics, Baudrillard speaks Symbolism opened a new space for poetic
of the emancipation of the sign. praxis, starting from the emancipation of the word
from its referential task.
A revolution has put an end to this "classical" The emancipation of money-the financial
economics of value, a revolution of value itself, sign-from the industrial production of things
which carries value beyond its commodity form follows the same semiotic procedure, from referential
into its radical form . to nonreferen tial signification.
This revolution consists in the dislocation of But the analogy between economy and language
the rwo aspects of the law of value, which were should not mislead us: although m oney and lan-
thought to be coherent and eternally bound as if guage have something in common, their destinies do
by a natural law. Referential value is annihilated, not coincide, as language exceeds economic exchange.
giving the stmctural play of value the upper hand. Poetry is the language of nonexchangeability, the
138 1 rne Upr,s.ng. On Poetr; and Rnance PQt;iry ano Fonance 139
return of infinite hermeneutics, and the return of Since 2001 we have witnessed a dismantling of
rhe sensuous body of language. the general intellect that started after the dot-com
I'm talking about poetry here as an excess of crash in the spring of 2000. During the first
language, a hidden resource which enables us to shift decade of the new century, cognitive labor was dis-
from one paradigm to another. empowered and subjected to precarization.
The social and affective body of the cognitive
workers has been separated from their daily activity
A PLACE WE DO NOT KNOW of production. The new alienation is based on this
separation , on the virtualization of social relations.
Angel, if there were a place we do nor know, and there The n ew alienation takes the form of psychic
On some ineffable carpet, the lovers, who never suffering, panic, depression, and a suicidal tide.
Could achieve fulfillment here, could show T his is the affective character of the first genera-
Their bold lofty figures of heart-swings, tion of people who have learned more words fro m
Their towers of ecstasy, their pyramid a machine than from the mother.
That long since, where there was no standing-ground, T he insurrection against financial capitalism is
Were cremblingly propped cogether-<:<>uld succeed aimed to recompose the social and affective body.
Before the spectators around them, the innumerable T he student struggles that have exploded in Europe
silent dead: since the fall of 20 10 should n ot be seen as sud-
Would not these then throw their last, ever-hoarded, den outbursts of rage, but as the beginnings of
Ever-hidden, unknown to us, eternally a long-las ting process that will encompass the
Valid coins of happiness next d ecade: a cognitaria n insurrection of sorts.
Before their pair with the finally genuine smile Insurrection means a rising up, and also implies the
On the assuaged carpet? full deployment of the potencies of the actor. The
- Rainer Maria Rilke, "Fifth Elegy" actor that is appearing on the historical scene today
(Translated by C.E Macintyre) is the general intellect in its process of subjectivation.
The potencies of this actor are the potencies of
The reactivation of the social body is the precon- collective intelligence in the network, the potencies of
dition for the full d eployment of th e general knowledge, reduced to the narrow dogmatic uti-
intellect. lization that the capitalist economy is forcing on them.
140 1 The Upnsing: On Poetry and F1nance Pcetry and F1nance I 141
.. . *~}·. . . ,-w,_•
'
The full deployment of the general intellect falls informational process. T he activation of the potency
beyond the sphere of capitalism. of this connected intelligence, autonomously from
When general intellect will be able to reconsti- its capitalist use, is the lesson Wikileaks has to
tute its social and erotic body, capitalist rule will offer. And the new generation of rebels will find in
become obsolete. This is the new consciousness that this lesson a way to the autonomization and self-
comes from the explosion of the last months of2010, organization of the general intellect.
from the reclamation of knowledge's autonomy. In street demonstrations, the social and erotic
In the same period of the student revolt, the body of the cognitarians is finding rhythm and
Wikileaks event has exposed the other face of empathy. The main stake of street actions is the
cognitarian subjectivation. What is its meaning, reactivation of the body of the general intellect.
beyond the remarkable effect that Wikileaks has Bodily sensibiliry, blurred and stressed by precariry
had in the field of diplomacy and politics and war, and competition, are finding new modes of expres-
and obviously in the field of information? sion, so that desire may begin flowing again.
Wikileaks has displayed the infinite potency of
the collective networked intelligence. The unleashing Connection and Sensibility
of the creative force of the general intellect is the
momentous event that Julian Assange has been Sensibiliry is the abiliry to understand what cannot
able to orchestrate. I don't think that we really be verbalized, and it has been a victim of the pre-
needed to know the contents of all those cables carization and fractalization of time. In order to
and e-mails that Wikileaks disclosed. Actually, we reactivate sensibiliry, art and therapy and political
already knew that diplomats are paid to lie, and action have to all be gathered.
that soldiers are paid for killing civilians. In the sphere of precarious work, time has
Many interesting things have come out from been fragmented and depersonalized. Social time
the disclosures, but this is not my focus here. What is transformed into a sprawl of fractals, compatible
is more important concerning this event is the acti- fragments that can be recombined by the networked
vation of solidariry, compliciry, and independent machine: this is why I speak of the fractalization
collaboration between cognitarians that it represents: of time.
between programmers, hardware technicians, Aesthetic perception- here properly conceived
journalists, and artists who all take part in an of as the realm of sensibiliry and aesthesia- is
142 / n,e Upris:ng: On Poetry ancl Finance Poetry and F•nance I 143
direcrly involved in the technological transforma- be grasped and internalized thanks to refrains
tion of communication and work: in its attempt to that we have in our minds, in our sensitive and
efficiently interface with the connective environment, sensible brains.
the conscious organism appears to increasingly In his book Chaosmosis, G uatrari speaks of rhe
inhibit what we call sensibility. By sensibility, I "aesthetic paradigm." T his concept redefines rhe
mean the facul ty that enables human beings to historical and social perspective, and ir is fully
interpret signs rhar are nor verbal nor can be made integrated into the vision of ecosophy. An environ-
so, the ability to understand what cannot be mental consciousness adequate ro the technological
expressed in forms that have a finite syntax. T his complexity of hypermodernity, ecosophy is based
faculty reveals itself to be useless and even damaging on the acknowledgment of the crucial role of
in an integrated connective system, because sensi- aesthetics in the prospect of ecology.
bility tends to slow down the processes of interpre- Actually, aesthetics is the science dedicated to
tation, making them ambiguous and downgrading the study of the contact between the derma (the
the competitive efficiency of rhe semiotic agent. skin, the sensitive surface of our body-mind) and
Sensibility is in rime, and we need time to different chemical, physical, electromagnetic, elec-
understand the hypercomplex communication of tronic, and informational flows. Therefore, aesthetics
the body. Due to the acceleration of the info- has much to do with the modern psychopathology
rhythm, precarious workers are obliged to detect of contact, with the pathological effects of the
and interpret signs ar an ever-accelerating pace, acceleration of the info-flow and the precarizarion
and their sensibility is disturbed. T his is why of social existence. Guattari views the universe as a
therapy is increasingly involved in the political continuum of diverse and interrelated entities in
field of reactivating the social body and recomposing bodily contact with each other. It is both an organic
work in a process of subjecrivarion. and inorganic continuum, animal and machinic,
If we want to think through the relation mental and electronic, and the concatenation is
between art and {schizo) therapy, we have ro think made possible by ritournelles, semiotic markers of
in terms of the refrain. Guattari says that rhe rhythm. Rhythm is the common substance of signs
refrain is a semiotic concatenation (agencement) (word, music, vision) and the brain. The mind hooks
that is able to larch onto the environment. Cosmic, onto the other (the other mind, nature, artificial, or
terrestrial, social, and affective environ ments can social world) thanks to rhythmic concatenation.
144 I Tile Unnsng. On PcetrJ ar.::l Finance Poetry and F.nan:e I 145
In the past century, the century that trusted in words are subjected to the homogenization of
the future, art was essentially involved in the busi- exchange and valorization.
ness of acceleration. Futurism defined the relation Social communication is submitted to techno-
between art, the social mind, and social life. The linguistic interfaces: in order to exchange meaning in
cult of energy marked the artistic zeitgeist, up to the sphere of connectivity, conscious organisms have
the saturation of collective perception and the to adapt to the digital environment.
paralysis of empathy. Futurist rhythm was the In order to accelerate the circulation of value,
rhythm of info-acceleration, of violence and war. meaning is reduced to information, and tech no-
Now we need refrains that disentangle singular linguistic devices act as the communicative matrix.
existence from the social game of competition and The matrix takes the place of the mother in the
productivity: refrains of psychic and sensitive process of generating language.
autonomization, refrains of the singularization and But language and information do not overlap,
sensibilization of breathing, once unchained from and language cannot be resolved in exchangeability.
the congested pace of the immaterial assembly line In Ferdinand de Saussure's parlance, we may say
of semio-capitalist production. that the infinity of the parole exceeds the recombi-
Once upon a time, pleasure was repressed by nant logic of the langue, such that language can
power. Now it is advertised and promised, and escape from th e matrix and reinvent a social sphere
simultaneously postponed and deceived. This is of singular vibrations intermingling and projecting
the pornographic feature of semio-production in a new space for sharing, producing, and living.
the sphere of the market. Poetry opens the doors of perception to sin-
T he eye has taken the central place of human gularity.
sensory life, but this ocular domination is a domi- Poetry is language's excess: poetry is what in
nation of merchandise, of promises that are never language cannot be reduced to information, and is
fulfilled and always postponed. In the current not exchangeable, but gives way to a new common
conditions of capitalist competition, acceleration ground of understanding, of shared meaning: the
is the trigger for panic, and panic is the premise to creation of a new world.
depression. Singularity is forgotten, erased, and Poetry is a singular vibration of the voice. This
cancelled in the erotic domain of semio-capitalism. vibration can create resonances, and resonances
T he singularity of the voice and the singularity of may produce common space, the place where:
152 1 The Upns,ng. On Peevy and Finance Poetry and Finance I 153
•· .
• : .. & r r. ~-
language, inscribing techno-linguistic interfaces infinity which are not only virtual, but also a
which automatize enunciation. potentiality of life, and that can be actualized in
We are tracing here the dynamic of a disaster, situations.
the disaster that capitalism is inserting into hyper- We are on rhe threshold of a deterrirorialized and
modern subjectivity, the disaster of acceleration rhizomaric world, realizing the anrioedipal, schizo-
and panic. But simultaneously we have to look for form dream. Bur this dream is becoming true in the
a rhythm which may open a further landscap.e, a form of a global nightmare of financial derealization.
landscape beyond panic and beyond the precanous On this threshold we have to imagine a politics and
affects of loneliness and despair. an ethics of singularity, breaking our ties with expec-
In the chapter on aesthetic paradigm in tations of infinite growth, infinte consumption, and
Chaosmosis, Guattari rethinks the question of infinite expansion of the sel£
singularity in terms of sensitive finitude and the I n the preface to his Tractatus Logico-Philoso-
possible infinity of language. . phicus, Wirrgenstein writes: "in order to draw a
T he conscious and sensitive orgamsm, the limit to thinking we should have to be able ro
living individuality walking towards extinction, is think both sides of this limit (we should therefore
finite. But the creation of possible universes of have to be able to think what cannot be thought)."
meaning is infinite. Desire is the field of this (Wirrgensrein 1922, 27)
tendency of the finite towards a becoming-infinite. And he also writes:
To produce new infinities from a submersion in The lim irs of my language mean the limits of my
sensible finitude, infinities not only charged with world. Logic pervades the world: the limits of the
virtuali ty but with potentialities actualisable in world are also its limits. So we cannot say in
given situations, circumventing or dissociating logic, "The world has this in it, and this, bur nor
oneself from the Universals itemised by traditional that." For that would appear ro presuppose that
arts, philosophy, and psychoanalysis [ .. .] a new we were excluding certain possibilities, and this
love of the unknown .. . (G uattari 1995, 161) cannot be the case, since it would require that
logic should go beyond the limits of the world;
The finitude of the conscious and sensitive organism for only in that way could it view those limits
is the place where we imagine pro jectio ns of from the other side as well. We cannot think
154 1 Tl1e Upris1ng: On Pc etr1 and Finan:;e Po'"try and F1nanr:e I 155
what we cannot think; so what we cannot think of the semiotic limit, which is also the limit of the
we cannot say either. (Wittgenstein 1922, 68) experimentability of the world.
Scientists call this effect of auropoietic morpho-
And finally, he writes: "The subject does not belong genesis "emergence": a new form emerges and
to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world." takes shape when logical linguistic conditions
When W ittgenstein says that the limits of lan- make it possible to see it and to name it. Let's try
guage are the limits of the world, he is saying to understand our present situation from this
something that should be read in two different point of view.
ways. First, he is saying: what we cannot say we Digital fin ancial cap italism has created a
cannot do, we cannot experience, we cannot live, closed reality which cannot be overcome with the
because only in the sphere of language can we techniques of politics, of conscious organized
interact with the reality of Being. But he is also voluntary action, and of government.
saying that, because the world is what resides Only an act of language can give us the ability
within the limits of our language, what therefore to see and to create a new human condition, where
lies beyond the limits of language will only be able we now only see barbarianism and violence.
to be lived and experienced once our language is Only an act of language escaping the technical
able to elaborate that sphere of Being that lies automatisms of financial capitalism will make
beyond the present limit. possible the emergence of a new life form. The new
In fact, the philosopher writes: "the subject form of life will be the social and instinctual body
does not belong to the world, rather it is a limit of the general intellect, the social and instinctual
of the world." body that the general intellect is deprived of inside
The potency and extension of language the present conditions of financial dictatorship.
depends on the consistency of the subject, on his Only the reactivation of the body of the general
or her vision, on his or her situation. And the intellect- the organic, existen tial, historical fini-
extension of my world depends on the potency tude that embodies the potency of the general
of my language. intellect-will be able to imagine new infinities.
Guattari calls "chaosmosis" the process of going In the intersection of the finite and infinite, in the
beyond the limits of the world, and he calls this point of negotiation between complexity and chaos,
going beyond resemiotization: i.e., a redefinition it will be possible to generate a degree of complexity
156 / The Upnsu1g: On Poetry and F;nance Pcetry ano F.narce 1 157
greater than the degree of complexity that financial ~ social movement, at the end of the day, should
capitalism is able to manage and elaborate. use Irony as semiotic insolvency, as a mechanism of
Language has an infinite potency, but the exer- disentangling language, behavior, and action from
cise of language happens in finite conditions of the limits of the symbolic debt.
history and existence. Thanks to the establishment
of a limit, the world comes into existence as a
IRONY AND CYNICISM
world of language. Grammar, logic, and ethics are
based on the institution of a limit. But infinity
Mass Zynismus
remains unmeasurable.
Poetry is the reopening of the indefinite, the
ironic act of exceeding the established meaning In his book The Courage of Truth, a transcription
of lectures delivered at the College de France in
of words.
In every sphere of human action, grammar is 1984, Michel Foucault speaks of Diogenes and the
the establishment of limits defining a space of other ancient philosophers known as cynics, and
communication. Today the economy is the universal defines their thought as a practice of telling the
grammar traversing the different levels of human truth (parrhesia). Twenty-five years later, the word
activity. Language is defined and limited by its eco- cynicism has acquired a totally different meaning,
nomic exchangeability: this effects a reduction of almost the opposite: the cynic is someone who
language to information, an incorporation of techno- routinely lies to everyone, especially to him or her-
linguistic automatisms into the social circulation self. An intimate lie, the contradiction between
speech and belief, lies at the core of contemporary
of language.
Nevertheless, while social communication is a cynicism. Still, there remains a kind of consistency
limited process, language is boundless: its poten- between the ancient notion of cynicism-rigorous
tiality is not limited to the limits of the signified. truthfulness, individualism, ascetic behavior, and
Poetry is language's excess, the signifier disentangled disdain for power-and our own, which consists
from the limits of the signified. largely of lip service, moral unreliability, and
Irony, the ethical form of the excessive power of conformist subjugation to those in power. This
language, is the infinite game that words play to consistency lies in an awareness of the ambiguous
create and to skip and to shuffle meaning. nature of language, and an ability to suspend the
of the powerful is bad, but bending to it because imposed competition as the inescapable, generalized
there's nothing else to do. Unlike the ancient mode of relation among social actors. Workers, once
cynism, modern zynismus is not disruptive. It is linked by a sense of social solidarity and common
an internalization of the impotence of truth. As political hope, are now forced to think in cynical
Sloterdijk writes: terms: survival of the fittest.
Within the '68 movement, different cultures
... [T]his is the essential point in modern cyni- and political tendencies coexisted. Some dreamed
cism, the ability of its bearers to work, in spite of of the historical Aujhebung: the institution of a
anything that might happen, and especially, after proletarian dictatorship, who would seize power in
anything that might happen .. . cynics are not their own hands. Like Hegelians, the doctrinaire
dumb, and every now and then they certainly see M arxists dreamed of a triumph of reason in which
the nothingness to which everything leads. Their the good guys were destined to win. To remain
psychic (seelish) apparatus has become elastic with the proletariat was to be on the winning side
enough to incorporate as a survival factor a per- of history. When the wind turned and the workers'
manent doubt about their own activities. They movement was defeated, neoliberalism provided
know what they are doing, but they do it an ideology for a new wave of capitalist aggressivity.
because, in the short run, the force of circum- Those who wished to remain on the winning side
stances and the instinct for self-preservation are of history decided to stay with the winners because
speaking the same lan guage; and they are telling all that is real is rational, in the end! In their dialec-
them that it has to be so. (Sioterdijk 1988, 5) tical scheme, whoever wins is right, and whoever is
right is destined to win.
Contemporary mass cynicism can be linked to two The majority '68-era activists were not ortho-
different sources: the failure of twentieth-century dox dialecticians and did not expect any
utopian ideologies, and the perception that the Aujhebung. We never believed in the end of his-
exploitation of labor, competition, and war are torical complexity and the final establishment of
inevitable and irreversible. Mass cynicism results the perfect form of communism. This sounded
from the dissolution of social solidarity. Globali- false to students and yo ung workers, who were
zation and the systemic precariousness of the labor seeking autonomy in the present, not communism
market resulting from neoliberal deregulation have in the future.
162 I Tile Upns•ng: On Poetry and F1nance Poetry and F,nance I 163
Today's neoliberal conformists are the perverted . Of course irony-like sarcasm, its more aggres-
heirs of'68. Those who came to power after '89 in Sive form-can be an expression of cynicism. But
Russia, the US, and Europe are not as free from irony and cynicism should not be conflated. Irony
ideology as they pretend. Their ideology is a can be a linguistic tool for rationalizing cynical
dogmatic faith in the unquestionability of the behavior. Both irony and cynicism imply a dissoci-
economy. The economy has taken the place of the ation of language and behavior from consciousness:
all-encompassing Hegelian Dialectic of Reason. what you say is not what you think. But this disso-
Bending to the dominant power, neoliberals accept ciation takes different turns in irony and cynicism.
(economic) necessity. The only difficulty is that no Vladimir Jankelevitch defines cynicism in the
one knows which trends will achieve domi nance in following way in his book Irony: "(C]ynicism is
the complicated becoming of future events. often deceived moralism, and an extreme form of
Consequently, cynicism-despite its apparent irony .. . " Gankelevitch 1936, 23) Cynicism, he
inevitability- is weak, as a position. No one implies, is a learned form of irony, used for the
knows what will happen next. Unpredictable pleasure of shocking the philistines.
events cannot be reduced to logical necessity. Cynicism is the philosophy of exaggeration
(surenchere): as Jankelevitch writes, "irony after
Irony and Zynismus Socrates tends to be exaggeration of moral radical-
ism .. . " Cynicism is deceived moralism, a judg-
Sloterdijk is not alone in his conflation of mass m ent of behavior that depends on a fixed system
cynicism and irony. As h e writes in Critique: of (moral) values. Dialectical materialism, the
"From the very bottom, from the declassed urban philosophy of the past century, implied a form of
intelligentsia, and from the very top, from the moralism: anything (progress, socialism, etc.) that
summits of statesmanly consciousness, signals moves in the direction of history is good, whatever
penetrate serious thinking, signals that provide opposes the movement of history is bad. Post-'68
evidence of a radical, ironic treatment (Ironizimmg) cynicism results from a painful awakening. Since
of ethics and of social conventions, as if universal the truth has not been fulfilled, we'll align our-
laws existed only for the stupid, while the fatally selves with the untruth. And this is where irony
clever smile plays on the lips of those in the know." and cynicism differ. Ironic discourse never presup-
(Siorerdijk 1988, 4) poses the existence of a truth that will be fulfilled
164 I Tne Upnsu1g: On Pvetry e.nd Ftnar.ce Poetry and Ftnance / 165
or realized. Irony implies the infinite process of suffered and inflicted, irony is based upon sympathy.
interpretation, whereas cynicism results from a While cynical behavior pivots upon a false relation
(lost) faith. The cynic has lost his or her faith; the with interlocutors, irony involves a shared suspen-
ironist never had a faith to begin. In Jankelevitch's sion of reality. The use of irony implies a shared
words: "[I]rony is never disenchanted for the good sense of assumptions and implications between
reason that irony has refused to be enchanted ." oneself and one's listeners. Irony cannot be conflated
(Jankelevitch 1936, 24) with lying. As Jankelevitch writes:
And yet, irony and cynicism both start with a
suspension of disbelief in both the moral content of Lying is a state of war, and irony is a state of
truth, and morality's true content. Both cynics and peace. T he liar is not in agreement with the
ironists understand that the True and the Good do cheated. The gullible consciousness is late in rela-
not exist in God's mind or in History, and that tion with the lying consciousness, which is trying to
human behavior isn't based upon respect for any maintain its advantage. Irony, instead, is crediting
law. In Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, Deleuze the interlocutor of sagacity and treats him/her as
says this of irony and the law: "Irony is still in the a true parrner of true d ialogue. Irony incites
process or movement which bypasses the law as a intellection, and is calling a fraternal echo of
merely secondary power and aims at transcending it understanding. Oankelevitch 1936, 24)
toward a higher principle." (Deleuze 1989, 86)
Neither irony nor cynicism believe in the true The conflation between power and the incessant
foundation of law. But the cynical person bends movement of historical events toward the good
to the law while mocking its false and preten- that defined Marxist thought was sundered. Here
tious values, while the ironic person escapes the the fork between irony and cynicism opens.
law altogether, creating a linguistic space where Irony suspends the semantic value of the signi-
law has no effectiveness. The cynic wants to be on fier to freely choose among a thousand possible
the side of power, even though he doesn't believe in interpretations. Ironic interpretations of events
its righteousness. T he ironist simply refuses the presuppose a common understanding between
game, recreating the world on the basis of language speakers and listeners; a sympathy among those
that is incongruent with reality. Whereas mass who, engaged in the iron ic act, arrive at a common
cynicism (zynismus) has to do with aggression, both autonomy fro m the dictatorship of the signified.
166 / The Upris1ng: On P0Bt1y and F1nance Poetry and Finance I 167
T
I
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