Ill\ l l3lll ll10ll lllllll2ll\l1l lli2~i [3lili1illl2~ll8llll li~29[l llll02l lll\1 11111 l~3 Poetry is the language of nonexchangeability, 1 ..,., ' """" ._,I IV IJQI Q l \;A the return of infinite hermeneutics, and the return of the sensuous body of language. I'm talking about poetry here as an excess of language, a hidden resource which enables us to shift from one paradigm to another. The Uprising

on Poetry and Finance

'II

~0

t(e) 0 n 2021 .847 2012 AC/Mein Franco "Bifo" Berardi

SEMIOTEXT(E) INTERVENTION SEIUES

© 2012 by Franco "Bifo" Berardi The Uprising

All rights reserved. No parr of this book may be reproduced, srored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, elec­ tronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, On Poetry and Finance without prior permission of the publisher.

Published by Semiorext(e) 2007 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 427, Los Angeles, CA 90057 www.semiorexte.com

Earlier versions of portions of this book were published in the web-magazine e-jlux in spring 20 II.

Thanks to Roberr Dewhurst, John Eben, Marc Lowenthal and Jason Smith.

Design: Hedi El Kholti

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

1. The European Collapse 23

2. Languag e, Economy, and t he Body 71

3. The Genera l Intellect Is Looking for a Body 103

4. Poetry and Finance 134

References 171 Introduction

These texts were written in 201 1, the first year of the European uprising, when European society entered into a deep crisis that seems to me much more a crisis of social imagination than mere economics. Economic dogma has taken hold of the public discourse for three decades, and has destroyed the critical power of political reason. The collapse of the global economy has exposed rhe dangers of economic dogmatism, bur irs ideology has already been incorporated into the auromarisms of living society. Political decision has been replaced by techno­ linguistic auromatisms embedded in the inter­ connected global machine, and social choices are submitted to psychic automatisms embedded in social discourse and in the social imaginary. Bur the depth of the catastrophe represented by rhe collapse is awakening hidden potencies of rhe social brain. The financial collapse marks the beginning of an insurrection whose first glimpses

7

- -- . . .,,... +\"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

8 I The Upns1ng: On Poetry and Finanr:ce ln!loduction I 9 of humanism to the theory and the practice of denounced. Concerns about food safety have modern politics. Machiavelli speaks of the Prince prompted US officials to halt the importation of as a male force who is able to subdue fortuna certain foods from Japan. Bur the Fukushima effect (chance, the chaotic flow of events), the female does not imply a disruption of social life: poison has side of history. become a normal feature of daily life, the second What we are experiencing now, in the age of nature we have to inhabit. infinite acceleration of the infosphere, is the During the last few years disruptions have mul­ following: feminine fortuna can no longer be sub­ tiplied in the planetary landscape, but they have jected and domesticated by the masculine force of not produced a change in the dominant paradigm, political reason, because fortuna is embodied in the a conscious movement of self- organization, or a chaotic flows of the overcrowded infosphere and in revolutionary upheaval. the chaotic flows of financial microtrading. The The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has not led disproportion between the arrival rate of new to the eviction of BP, it has rather consolidated its information and the limited time available for power, because BP was the only force which could conscious processing generates hypercomplexity. manage the disruption and hopefully bring it Therefore projects that propose to rationally under control. change the whole social field are out of the picture. The fi nancial collapse of September 2008 did The horizon of our time is marked by the not lead to a change in US economic politics. Fukushima event. Compared to the noisy catastro­ Despite the hopes raised by Barack Obama's vic­ phes of the earthquake and the tsunami, Tokyo's tory, the financial class did not relax its grip on silent apocalypse is more frightening and suggests a the economy. new framework of social expectation for daily life on In Europe, after the Greek crisis in 2010, the planet. The megalopolis is directly exposed to neoliberal ideology-although clearly the source of the Fukushima fallout, but life is proceeding almost the collapse-has not been dismissed. On the normally. Only a few people have abandoned the contrary, the Greek disruption (and the following city. Most citizens have stayed there, buying mineral Irish and Italian and Spanish and Portuguese water as they have always done, breathing with face disruptions) has strengthened the rigor of mone­ masks on their mouths as they have always done. tarist policies and stressed the prospect of reducing A few cases of air and water contamination are salaries and social spending.

10 I The Uoris.ng: On Pcetr>• and Frnance ln!roductron I 11 At a systemic level, change is taking the form of is to impoverish public schooling and to prop up positive feedback. media conformism. The result of the spread of In his work on cybernetics, Norbert Wiener ignorance and conformism will be a new electoral speaks of negative feedback in order to define the victory, and so on. This is why it is difficult not output of a system when it acts to oppose changes to see the future of Europe as a dark blend of to the input of the system, with the result that the techno-financial authoritarianism and aggressive changes are reduced and attenuated. If the overall populist reaction. . feedback of the system is negative, then the system Autonomy, in this condition, will be essentially will tend to be stable. In the social field, for the ability to escape environments where the instance, we can say that the system is exhibiting positive feedback is switched on. How is it possible negative feedback if protests and fights oblige the to do that, when we know that the planetary industry to increase salaries and reduce exploitation environment and global society are increasingly when social misery becomes too hard and too subjected to this catastrophic trend? widespread. How can we think of a process of subjectivation In Wiener's parlance, a system exhibits positive when precarity is jeopardizing social solidarity feedback when, on the contrary, it increases the and when the social body is wired by techno­ magnitude of a perturbation in response to the linguistic automatisms which reduce its activity perturbation itself. Obviously, unintended positive to a repetition of embedded patterns of behavior? feedback may be far from being "positive" in the With this book, I am trying to develop the sense of desirable. We can also speak of self­ theoretical suggestions of Christian Marazzi, Paolo reinforcing feedback. Virno, and in an unusual My impression is this: in conditions of info­ direction. These thinkers have conceptualized the acceleration and hypercomplexity, as the conscious relation between language and the economy, and and rational will becomes unable to check and to described the subsumption and the subjugation adjust the trends, the trends themselves become of the biopolitical sphere of affection and language self-reinforcing up to the point of final collapse. to financial capitalism. I am looking for a way Look at the vicious circle: right-wing electoral to subvert this subjugation, and I try to do that victories and dictatorships of ignorance. When from the unusual perspectives of poetry and right-wing parties win, their first preoccupation sensibility.

12 I The Upris;ng: On Poetry and F1nar.ce tntrccluction I 13 Swarm are not playing the game. If you don't react to certain stimuli in the programmed way, you don't When the social body is wired by techno-linguistic form part of the network. The behavior of persons automatisms, it acts as a swarm: a collective organism in a network is not aleatory, like the movements of whose behavior is autom atically directed by a crowd, because the network implies and predis­ connective interfaces. poses pathways for the networker. A mulritude is a plurality of conscious and A swarm is a plurality of living beings whose sensitive beings sharing no common intentionality, behavior follows (or seems to follow) rules embed­ and showing no common pattern of behavior. The ded in their neural systems. Biologists call a swarm crowd shuffling in the city moves in countless a multitude of animals of similar size and bodily different directions with countless different mori­ orientation, moving together in the same direction vations. Everybody goes their own way, and the and performing actions in a coordinated way, like intersection of those displacements makes a crowd. bees building a hive or moving toward a plant Sometimes the crowd moves in a coordinated way: where they can find resources for making honey. people run together towards the station because In conditions of social hypercomplexity, human the train is soon expected to leave, people stop beings tend to act as a swarm. When the infosphere together at traffic lights. Everybody moves following is too dense and too fast for a conscious elaboration his or her will, within the constraints of social of information, people tend to conform to shared interdependency. behavior. In a letter to John Seabrook, Bill Gates If we want to understand something more wrote: "the digital revolution is all about facilitation­ about the present social subjectivity, the concept of crearing tools to make things easy" (Seabrook, the multitude needs to be complemented with the 52). In a broader sense, we may say that in the concepts of the network and swarm. digital age, power is all about making things easy. A network is a plurality of organic and artificial In a hypercomplex environment that cannot be beings, of humans and machines who perform properly understood and governed by the individual common acrions thanks to procedures that make mind, people will follow simplified pathways and possible their interconnection and interoperation. will use complexity-reducing interfaces. If you do not adapt to these procedures, if you This is why social behavior today seems to be don't follow the technical rules of the game, you trapped into regular and inescapable patterns of

14 I The Upnsing: On Poetry ar.cJ F1nance Introduction I 15 interaction. Techno-linguistic procedures, financial needs and affects has subjected social energies to obligations, social needs, and psycho-media inva­ the chain of capitalist culture. The history of sion- all this capillaric machinery is framing the capitalist domination cannot be dissociated from fi eld of the possible, and incorporating common the production and privatization of need- i.e., cognitive patterns in the behavior of social actors. the creation of cultural and psychic habits of So we may say that social life in the semio­ dependence. Social insolvency means independence capital sphere is becoming a swarm. from the list of priorities that capitalist conformism In a swarm it is not impossible to say "no." It's has imposed on society. irrelevant. You can express your refusal, your rebel­ From a linguistic and affective point of view, lion and your nonalignment, but this is not going insolvency is the line of escape from the reduction to change the direction of the swarm, nor is it of language to exchange. going to affect the way in which the swarm's brain The connective sign recombines automatically is elaborating information. in the universal language machine: the digital­ fi nancial machine that codifies existential flows. Automation of Language The word is drawn into this process of automation, so we find it frozen and abstract in the disempa­ The implication of language in the financial thetic life of a society that has become incapable of economy is crucial in the contemporary process solidari ty and autonomy. The automation of the of subjectivation. word takes place on two levels. In this book, I am trying to think about the The first level concerns monetarization and process of emancipating language and affects, and subjection to the financial cycle: signs fall under I start from the concept of insolvency. the domination of finance when the financial Insolvency is not only a refusal to pay the costs function (the accumulation of value through of the economic crisis provoked by the financial semiotic circulation) cancels the instinctual side class, but it is also a rejection of the symbolic debt of enunciation, so that what is enunciated m ay embodied in the cultural and psychic normaliza­ be compatible with digital-financial formats. tion of daily life. Misery is based on the cultural The production of meaning and of value takes conformism of the nuclear family, on the secluded the form of parthenogenesis: signs produce signs privacy of individual existence. Privatization of without any longer passing through the flesh.

16 I The Upns1ng: On Poetry and F1nanr:-e IntroduCtiOn I 17 Monetary value produces more monetary value process of dereferentialization that occurred when without being first realized through the material the economy became a semio-economy. production of goods. The financialization of the capitalist economy A second level is indexicalization. In his paper implies a growing abstraction of work from its useful titled "Quand les mots valent de !'or," Frederic function, and of communication from its bodily Kaplan speaks of the process of language's indexi­ dimension. As symbolism experimented with the calization in the framework of Internet search separation of the linguistic signifier from its deno­ engines. Two algorithms define the reduction of tational and referential function, so financial linguistic meaning to economic value via a Google capitalism, after internalizing linguistic potencies, search: the first finds the various occurrences of a has separated the monetary signifier from its func­ word, the second links words with monetary value. tion of denotation and reference to physical goods. The subsumption of language by the semio­ Financial signs have led to a parthenogenesis of capitalist cycle of production effectively freezes the value, creating money through money without the affective potencies of language. generative intervention of physical matter and The history of this subsumption passes through muscular work. Financial parthenogenesis sucks the twentieth century, and poetry predicted and down and dries up every social and linguistic prefigurated the separation of language from the potency, dissolving the products of human activity, affective sphere. Ever since Rimbaud called for a especially of collective semiotic activity. dereglement de to us les sens, poets have experimented The word is no longer a factor in the conjunction with the forgetting of the referent and with the of talking affective bodies, but a connector of signi­ autonomous evocation of the signifier. fying functions rranscodified by the economy. Once The experience of French and Russian symbolism deprived of its conjunctive ability, the word becomes broke the referential-denotative link between the a recombinant function, a discreet (versus continuous) word and the world. At the same time, symbolist and formalized (versus instinctual) operator. poets enhanced the connotational potency of lan­ In 1977 the American anthropologist Rose guage to the point of explosion and hyperinclusion. Khon Goldsen, in The Show and Tell Machine, Words became polysemous evocations for other wrote the following words: "We are breeding a new words, and thus became epiphanic. This magic of generation of human beings who will learn more postreferential language anticipated the general words from a machine than from their mothers."

18 I The Upris•ng: On Poetry and F:nance lntroouction I 19 That generation is here. The connective genera­ Poetry is the voice of language, in this sense: it tion entering the social scene today fully suffers the is the reemergence of the deictic function (from pathogenic and disempathetic effects of the deixis, self-indication) of enunciation. Poetry is the automation of the word. here and now of the voice, of the body, and of the word, sensously giving birch to meaning. Poetry and the Deautomation of Language While the functionaliry of the operational word implies a reduction of the ace of enuncia­ We have too many things and not enough forms. tion co connective recombinabilicy, poetry is the -Gustave Flauberc, Prifoce a Ia vie d'ecrivain excess of sensuousness exploding into the circuitry of social communication and opening again the Fonn fascinates when one no longer has the force to dynamic of the infinite game of interpretation: understand force from within itself desire. -Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference In the incrodution co the first volume of his seminal book Du Sens, Algirdas Julien Greimas speaks of interpretation as an infinite slippage of The voice and poetry are two strategies for reactivation. the transition from signifier to signified. Once poetry foresaw the abandonment of This infinite slippage (or slide, or drift) is based referentialicy and the automation of language; on the intimate ambiguity of the emotional side of now poetry may scare the process of reactivating language {language as excess movement). the emotional body, and therefore of reactivating We have co stare a process of deautomating the social solidarity, starting from the reactivation of word, and a process of reactivating sensuousness the desiring force of enunciation. (singularity of enunciation, the voice) in the sphere For Giorgio Agamben, in Language and Death, of social communication. the voice is the point of conjunction between Desire is monstruous, it is cruel, and noncom­ meaning and flesh. The voice is the bodily singu­ pliance and nonrecombinabilicy are at the inmost larity of the signifying process, and cannot be nature ofsi ngularity. Singularity cannot be compliant reduced to the operational function of language, with a finite order of interpretation, but it can be notwithstanding the research in protocols and compassionate with the infinite ambiguity of procedures for vocal recognition. meaning as sensuous understanding. Compassion

20 I The Upris'ng: On Poetry and FJnance IntroductiOn I 21 is sensibility open to the perception of uncountable sensuous beings, the condition for an autonomous becoming-other, beyond the financial freeze, beyond the techno-linguistic conformism that is THE EUROPEAN COLLAPSE making social life a desert of meaning. Poetic language is the insolvency in the field of enunciation: it refuses the exaction of a semiotic debt. Deixis (oei~t~) acts against the reduction of language to indexicalization and abstract indi­ viduation, and the voice acts against the recombinant THE FINANCIAL BLACK HOLE AND THE desensualization of language. VANISHING WORLD Poetic language is the occupation of the space of communication by words which escape the order Finance is the most abstract level of economic of exchangeability: the road of excess, says W illiam symbolization. It is the culmination of a process of Blake, leads to the palace of wisdom. And wisdom progressive abstraction that starred with capitalist is the space of singularity, bodily signification, the industrialization. Marx speaks of abstract labor creation of sensuous meaning. in the sense of an increased distancing of human activity from its concrete usefulness. In h is words, capitalism is the application of human skills as a means to obtain a more abstract goal: the accumulation of value. Nevertheless, in the age of industrialization analyzed by Marx, the production of useful goods was still a necessary step in the process of valorization itself. In order to produce abstract value, the industrial capitalist was obliged to produce useful things. This is no longer the case today, in the sphere of semio-capital. In the world of financial capitalism, accumulation no longer passes through the production of goods, but goes

22 1 Tne Upnsin::r On Postr; and F1nance 23 straight to its monetary goal, extracting value from this virtual bankruptcy. [ ... ] When one looks at the pure circulation ofmoney, from the virrualization the billboard on Broadway, with its flying figures, of life and intelligence. one has the impression that the debt takes off to ' Financialization and the virtualization of reach the stratosphere. This is simply the figure in human communication are obviously intertwined: light years of a galaxy that vanishes in the cosmos. thanks to the digitalization of exchanges, finance The speed of liberation of the debt is just like one has turned into a social virus that is spreading of earth's satellites. That's exactly what it is: the everywhere, transforming things into symbols. The debt circulates on its own orbit, with its own symbolic spiral of financialization is sucking down trajectory made up of capital, which, from now and swallowing up the world of physical things, on, is free of any economic contingency and of concrete skills and knowledge. \ The concrete moves about in a parallel universe (the acceleration wealth of Europeans is vanishing into a black hole of capital has exonerated money of its involvements of pure financial destruction. Nothing is created with the everyday universe of production, value from this destruction, while the financial class is and utility). It is not even an orbital universe: it is expropriating the outcome of the general labor rather ex-orbital, ex-centered, ex-centric, with force and of the general intellect. only a very faint probability that, one day, it likened the ever growing US might rejoin ours. (Baudrillard 1996) national debt to a missile orbiting above the earthly atmosphere. !In the last few years, contrary to Baudrillard's prediction, the probability that he considered very An electronic billboard in Times Square displays faint has become true. Debt has come back down the American public debt, an astronomic figure to Earth, and it is now acting as a condition for the of some thousands of billions of dollars which final predatory abstraction: life turned into time increases at a rate of $20,000 a second. [ ...] In for repaying a metaphysical debt. Life, intelligence, fact, the debt will never be paid. No debt will joy, breathing- humanity is going to be sacrificed ever be paid. The final counts will never take in order to pay the metaphysical debt. 1 place. [ ...] The United States is already virtually In the last decades of the century that trusted unable to pay, but this will have no consequence in the future, marked by the political hegemony whatsoever. There will be no judgment day for of neoliberal dogma, the invisible hand has been

24 I TI1e Uprising: On Poeir)' and Fina11ce The European Collapse I 25 embedded in the global technology of the linguistic 1 want to understand the process of dissolution machine, and language, the essential environment that is underway from the unusual point of view of of mankind, has been turned into a wired, auto­ the relationship between poetry and finance. ~at mated system. has poetry to do with finance, and finance wuh The essential processes of social communication poetry? Nothing, of course. Investors, stockholders, and production have escaped the capacities of and bankers are usually too busy, so they don't human knowledge and control. Irreversible trends waste their time with poetry. Poets are too poor to of devastation, pollution, and impoverishment are invest money in the stock market. There are excep­ marking the horizon of our time. tions, like T. 5. Eliot, who was employed at the Slavoj Ziiek reminds us that no end of the Lloyds Bank while writing The Waste Land, but world is in sight, only the possible end of capitalism this is not my point. that we are unable to imagine. Ziiek may be My point here concerns the deterritori~izatio~ right, but we should consider the eventuality effect which has separated words from thetr semi­ that capitalism has so deeply pervaded every otic referents and money from economic goods. physical and imaginary dimension of the world Let's consider the effect of dereferentialization that its collapse may lead to the end of civiliza­ which is the main thread of twentieth century tion itself. poetic research (beginning with the symbolist The financialization of the economy is essen~ dereglement des sens et des mots), and we'll ~nd tially to be seen as a process of the subsumption of some similarities with the economic reconfiguranon the processes of communication and production that occurred during the last three decades of the by the linguistic machine. The economy has century, from the neoliberal deregulation to the been invaded by immaterial semiotic flows and monetarist abstract reregulation. transformed into a process of linguistic exchange; Because of the technological revolution pro­ simultaneously, language has been captured by duced by information technology, the relation the digital-financial machine, and transformed between time and value has been deregulated. into a recombination of connective operational Simultaneously, the relation between the sign and segments. The techno-linguistic machine that is the thing has blurred, as the ontological guarantee the financial web is acting as a living organism, and of meaning based on the referential status of the its mission is drying up the world. signifier has broken apart.

26 I Tne Upris'ng: On Poetry anci Finance Tt1e European Collapse I 27 "Deregulation" is a word that was first proposed The technical subjection of choices to the by the poet Arthur R.imbaud, and later recycled as logic of concatenation. . . . a metaphor by neoliberal ideologues. Dbi!glement IT he recombination of companble (companbl- des sens et des mots is the spiritual skyline of late lized) fragments (fractals). 1

modern poetry. Words and senses wanted to escape 1 T he inscription of a digital rhythm into the the frame of representation, of denotation, and of social body. 1 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 w1"11 , but simultaneously subm1ss1o n to Neoliberal ideology starts from the same techno-linguistic automatisms. 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-on 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 fr om 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 represe nted 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 from the representation of preexisting reality and relation between living organisms. f from a correspondence with the referent, but

28 I Tt1e Upns1ng: On Poetry and F1nance TI1e European Co~ lacse I 29 from the evocative force of sound, and voice, and As the economy ceases to deal with the produc­ rhythm. tion of things, and instead begins to evoke the world . T~e dereferentialization of language-the eman­ from the circulation of money, the hypertrophic Cipation of the linguistic sign from the referent­ rowth of the debt becomes inevitable. that was the operation of symbolism, and that was g Neoliberal ideology pretends to be a liberating t~e hallmark of poetic and artistic experimentation force that emancipates capital from state regu~a­ WJ.th language in the twentieth century, has some­ tion, but it in fact submits production and social thmg to do with a transformation in the relation life to the most ferocious regulation, the mathema­ between the economy and monetary exchange that tization of language. occured in the last part of the century. Systematic impoverishment is imposed o~ social 1 In ?72, Ri,~hard Nixon did something that can life by the logic of debt repayment. ~at IS d~bt; be considered dereferentialization" in the realm of actually? Is it an inescapable, metaphysiCal necessity. monetary economy. Breaking the Bretton Woods No. Debt is an act of language, a promise. The agreements, the American president said that the transformation of debt into an absolute necessity ~oJlar would have no reference to reality, and that is an effect of the religion of neoliberalism, which Its value would henceforth be decided by an act of is leading the contemporary world towards bar­ language, not by correspondence to a standard or barianism and social devastation. to an economic referent. The premise of neoliberal dogmatism is the Nixon's decision was the starting point of th reduction of social life to the mathematical impli­ financialization of the economy, based on th: cations of financial algorithms. What is good for emancipation of the financial dynamic from any con­ finance must be good for society, and if society ventional standard and from any economic reality. does not accept this identification and submission, We may assert that neoliberal dictatorship then that means that society is incompetent, and ~egan when the Chicago Boys decreed that money needs to be redressed by some technical authority. mvented reality, when monetary evaluation fore­ Goldman Sachs consultants, or bankers-like d~sed the referent. Forget about the referent, money Lucas Papademous of Greece and Mario Monti of U:zlf create the world-this is the arrogant declara­ Italy-are imposed by financial power as unques­ tion, of the omnipotence of economJ·c power, tionable leaders of those countries which lag which founded neoliberal monetarism. behind the necessary submission to the technical

30 1 The Upns ng: On Pee try and F1nan:;e The European Col!apse / 3 1 authority of statistics, algorithms, and figures, of that enterprise, that bank, or that country. They which don't want to conceive of the general interest preten d to Predict something about the futureh of in mathematics, or believe that social life must chat enterprise, bank, or country. Actually, t ey be submitted to the unquestionable rationale of Utter a self-fulfilling prophecy. The falsely the markets. rath e r . . m pre d.IC t'veI enunciations of these agenCies are When democratic rituals endanger the execu­ . 'llocutionary acts (performative utterances), rea 1ny I . tion of the austerity plans which are destined to SOC'alI CO mmunications that have been submitted to restore the mathematical perfection of social life, the techno-linguistic implications of the economy. and to pay the infinite debt that we owe to the Contemporary science and epistemology are banks, democracy is cancelled-as happened in totall y a t Odds with the reductionist methodology Greece when the democratically elected President of the financial economy. . . Papandreou dared to call for a referendum on the The faith in the financial balance wh1ch IS austerity measures imposed by the European imposed on the European pop~lation is based on banking system. Markets expelled the democratically a philosophical misunderstandmg: th~ promoters elected Greek president, and replaced him of financial stability chink chat the social body and overnight with a Goldman Sachs consultant. mathematics belong to the same sphere. They are What is the whimsical, supercilious entity which wrong, as reality is not mathematical, and mathe­ is often nervously referred to as "the markets"? matics is not the law of reality, but a language Markets are the visible manifestation of the whose consistency has nothing to do with the inmost mathematical interfunctionality of algo­ multilayered consistency of life. rithms embedded in the techno-linguistic machine: Mathematics is not in itself ferocious. Mathe­ they utter sentences that change the destiny of matics becomes ferocious when it is forcibly the living body of society, destroy resources, and inscribed into the living organism of society, and swallow the energies of the collective body like a chis ferocious mathematization of the living body of draining pump. society is preparing the worst evolution of Europe. Financial enunciations pretend to abide by the It should be ludicrous to say that Goldman rules of indexicality. The rating agencies which Sachs consultants, or the European Central Bank downgrade or upgrade an enterprise, a bank, or a director, or the chancellor of Germany, are Nazis. nation pretend to act as indicators of the real situation They don't look like sadistic murderers, but they

32 I TI1e Up:ising: On Poetry and F1nance The European Collapse I 33 want to peacefully submit the European popula­ algorithmic chain can be described as the imposition tion to mathematical slavery, which is clean, of a symbolic debt. smooth, perfect. From this perspective, we ca n argue that the In this way they are simultaneously establishing disentanglement of social life from the ferocious a cold form of totalitarianism, and preparing a hot domination of mathematical exactitude is a poetic form of massive fascist reaction. The abstract, cold task , as poetry is language's excess: an insolvent violence of dererritorialized financial dictatorship enunciation in rhe face of rhe symbolic debt. is preparing the violent reterritorializarion of the reactive body of European society: nation, race, The Dystopic Prophecy of Poetry ethnic cleansing, and religious fundamentalism are reappearing on the scene. The arallel histories of poetry and finance may be The algorithmic chain has an intrinsic causality, rerra~ed starring from rhe concept of the "hy~err~­ which is the consistent causality of a language aliry of floating values," as Baudrillard .pur it 111 h1s created by the human mind in a sphere of self­ seminal Symbolic Exchange and Death 111 1976. . validating (tautological) abstraction. The financial From symbolism to futurism, up to the expen­ religion is transferring the consistency of the algo­ ences of the bear generation and fluxus, poets have rithmic chain into the social reality of the collective anticipated and predicted the trajectory of the body. This is the philosophical misunderstanding Jobal economy and of the ordinary business of life. which corresponds to the economic interests of the fr has mostly been a frantic anticipation, a dyscopic posrbourgeois class of financial predators. prophecy, as poets forebode the c~mi~g . dis~orrions Imposing mathematical causality on rhe and perversions of the huge deternconal1zanon that uncertainty of the bodily and social processes of would come with capitalist globalization. becoming-other is the most dangerous of mistakes. Think of "The Second Coming" by William It is provoking the birth of a new form of fascism, Butler Years: which is already underway in many countries of Europe, as more and more people are turning Turning and tuming in the widening gy're toward racist sentiments, and a wave of depression, The falcon cannot hear the falconer; despair, and suicide is sweeping the continent. The Things faLL apttrt; the centre cannot hold; subjection of social communication to the financial Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

34 I The Upns,r.g: On Pceiry and Finance The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and eve1ywhere which is devastating social life. They are the pre­ The ceremony of imzocence is drowned,· carious generation, obliged to accept exploitation The best lnck all conviction, while the worst Are fit!! ofpassionate intensity. and low wages, depleted of necessary resources for their education, promised a future of the endless Then, he says: repetition of a meaningless act of sacrifice on the altar of debt. They are simultaneously the first

Surely some revelation is at hand,· connected generation, the first generation of Internet natives. They are not only protesting Surely the Second Coming is at hand. against the gruesome effects of ne~liberal ~ule, W~ar revelation can we read in Years's poem, they are also looking for a new meanmg of thmgs, Wntten in I 9 I 9? activity, and love. . . The global deterritorialization of financial capi­ The center cannot hold, and things have fallen apart, detached from their meaning. The revela­ talism has spread precariousness, psychic fragility, and tion of the century is the devastating spiral of desolidarization. Therefore the current precarious abstraction and nihilism: abstraction of work from insurrection questions the rhythmic disturbance activity, abstraction of goods from usefulness, provoked by semio-capital, and tries to o~erc~me abstraction of time from sensuousness. Abstraction our existing inability to tune into a shared vibration. has detached the epidermis of language from the flesh of the linguistic body. At the beginning of the second decade of rhe THE POWER OF IMAGINATION AND THE EUROPEAN COLLAPSE new century, as deregulated predatory capitalism is destroying the future of the planer and of social life, poetry is going to play a new game: the game In the crucial year 1933, Julien Benda wrote the of reactivating the social body. following words, in his book Discours a Ia nation (Address to the European nation): In the streets of Europe and in the whole europeenne Me~iterranean basin, young people are revolting agamsr the brutal exploitation of their rime and Europe will not be the fruit of an economic trans­ formation: it will exist only when it will adopt a intelligence, and against the financial abstraction certain system of moral and aesthetic values.

36 I The Uprising: On Poetry ancl F1nance The European Collapse / 37 I want to start from these words of Benda's because regu Ianon · that leads to the impoverishment. . of I want to talk about Europeaness: what Europe is, European societies·· to the slashmg of salanes, to what Europe may be, what Europe cannot be. I the postponement of retirement, and ftn~lly, to start from Julien Benda and from this well-known the sad project of destroying, of devastanng, of speech on the European nation, because what is dismantling the general intellect. remarkable in his text is his being conscious of the This is the central project of Europe nowa- fact that Europe is not an existing entity, bur some­ days: t he destruction of collective intelligence.. thing that has to be created by the imagination. Or, if you want to say it in a more pros~Ic w_ay, What has Europe been over the past century? the destruction of the university, and the subjugauon First of all, Europe has been the project of going the narrow interests of profit and 0 f researc h to beyond war, going beyond a cultural and philo­ economic competition. sophical war, not only the war between France You know the situation of our most recent and Germany, bur the war between romanticism generation of students, for instance: we are teaching and Enlightenment. So, at the beginning of the things that may be good or bad, but are in the end twentieth century, the European project was useless as far as their future is concerned, because essentially a project of the will, spirit, and imagi­ they don't have a future. . nation, if you will. Then in the 1970s and '80s, Not having a future: this is already a kind of the project of Europe became a project of over­ refrain, but I think we should start from this consi­ coming the opposition between East and West, deration, from this obvious knowledge-the idea of between democracy and existing socialism, and a nonexistent future-as a condition of thought: if so on-a project that existed in the imagination we start by dismantling the very possibility of .a of Europeans. future, we are obliged to go beyond the dogmanc What now? This is the question I'm trying to reassertion of neoliberalism. answer. What is Europe now? If we listen to the Let us look at the landscape of philosophical speeches of Angela Merkel, for instance, and to and political thought in Europe today, the s~­ those of all the other European politicians, be called European high culture. The landscape IS they leftist or rightist, it makes no difference ... rather gloomy. Europe is a dogmatic project of reassuming and I remember what the philosophical discussion reinforcing neoliberal ideology, of a neoliberal was in the 1960s and '70s, in the wake of the

38 I Ti1e Upnsing: On Pcetry and Finance The European Collapse I 39 Critical Theory that made possible the creation of c · ce This too was an important anticipa- the European entity in the sphere of dialectical ror mstan · ' ' . fwhat Europe was going to become. thought. non o · f The good and, in a sense, benevolent 1dea o I remember what French thought was in the h H abermasian dialogic society, on the one I 970s and in the '80s, in the age of t e f . . .d h predicted benefits o commumcatton, and Felix Guattari, , Jacques s1 e: t e . h deceptive ill usion of communication based m Derrida, and Jean-Franc;:ois Lyotard. Their thought t e d h al" · d emocra Cy· And ' on the other si e, t e re 1snc was an attempt to imagine a possible future, but it consideration of Luhmann, who describe~ a was also much more: it offered a cartography of the future without alternatives, without poSSible coming future of the neoliberal, self-proclaimed deregulation. utopia· s , a future of governance. This. was a high­I profile discussion, which was focusmg the rea ' I think, for instance, of Foucault's wonderful problematic horizon of the Euro_pean future. book, The Birth ofBiopolitics, which was probably Governance, this word which has totally the most enlightening, imaginative forewarning invaded the field of political nonrhought, was of what was going to happen in the landscape of the world. first proposed and deconstructed by L~hman n i_n the I970s and '80s. What is the meanmg of this And I also think of books like Anti-Oedipus and word, beyond the political manipulations of the A Thousand Plateaus, and Baudrillard's Symbolic ruling class over the last few decades? Exchange and Death. These are the most important As far as I can understand, the fact that gover­ books of the I 970s and '80s, and you can read nance is a word which is much used and never them all as cautionary imaginations of the coming defined today is a symptom of the total poverty neoliberal revolution. The work of these French of the political practice of our time. philosophers of the I970s and '80s has formulated If we begin from the Luhmannian perspec­ a cartography of the coming dystopia: a way of tive, we can understand that governance is the thinking about the coming future as a dark age of automation of thought, the automation of social violence and impoverishment. existence. Governance is information without Then I look at the landscape of German philo­ meaning, a dominance of the unavoidable. sophy in the I 970s and '80s: I consider the debate In governance praxis, economic dogma is between ]i.irgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann, transformed into techno-linguistic automatism.

40 I TI1e Upris;ng: On Poetry and Finance Tr.e Eu,opean Co'taose 1 41 T his is governance at its very end. In this sense philosophes, have paved t~e way to dogmatis~, Luhmann was ki nd of like a Philip K. Dick of violence, racism, impovenshment, and fi nancial poli tical thought; he was like the Johnny Rotten dictatorship. of political imagination. He was speaking abour A light of possible intell igence and openness no future, the coming no future, which is the seems to come nor from philosophy, bur from art. here and now. I am not actually sure of what I am talking Starting from this sense of no future that the about when I say the word art. Yo u aren't po ~i tica l thought of the 1970s and '80s had pro­ either-nobody is exactly. claimed and mapped in advance, we can under­ Yet it seems that in a recent poll, twen ty-four stand what is happening today in the present to cwenry-five percent of young German people Europea n nightmare. interviewed by journalists answered the question . ~~ ose thinkers were able to imagine and to "what do you want to do when you're an adult" cnticize, but now? Now, cynicism has invaded by stating that they wanted to be artists. What the sphere of thought, no less than the sphere of are they picturing? What do they think being an politics. artist means, exactly? Are they thinking about Look at the sadness of French cynical the rich possibilities that the art market offers? thought, think of what has become of the inrel­ Well, maybe, but I don't think so. I think that lecrual landscape of Paris: a monument to sadness they are saying that they want to be artists a monument to cynicism. Paris today is a c i ~ because they feel that being an artist means to wh ~ re t ~ o ught has been transformed into jour­ escape a future of sadness, to escape a future of n alism, Into the continuous repetition of this precariousness as sadness. They are thinking, well, ki nd of illusion of European arrogance w hich precariousness and sadness can become some­ has ~ aved the way to the fi nancial collapse, to thing different, something not so sad, not so th ~ 111finite war that George W Bush has pro­ precarious, if they with draw their faith, if they clai,med, ~ nd that Tony Blair, Nicolas Sarkozy, withdraw from any expectations a capitalist Jose Man a Aznar, and Silvio Berl usconi have future can offer. I don't want to expect anything supported. from the future, so I start my fu ture as an artist. T he cynical nonthinkers who inhabit the Parisian scene of today, once called les nouveaux

The European Col!apse I 43 PURGATORY wielded by both the left and right wings for the "The German worker does not want to pay the last thirty years. . . Greek fisherman's bills." The fanatics of economic Second manipulation: Postponmg the rettrement fundamentalism are pitting workers against work­ age increases youth employment. ers and leading Europe to the brink of civil war. In An absurd assessment. If an elderly worker their relentless efforts to transfer money and reure. s, Iog ically a new job will be available kfor .a resources from society to the financial classes, younger Worker· If' however, an elderly. wor er IS neoliberal ideologues have never hesitated to use roKec d to work an additional five, SIX,. or seven manipulation and deception: their half-truths years bey Ond what was stipulat.ed 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 work er 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. pnnCip. . le ,·n which elderly workers must be forced 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

44 I The Upnsing: On Poetry and Finance T11e European Collapse I 45 interested in increasing profits, not promoting the What is inflation? Inflation is either a reduction public good. And when reduction in quality leads in the value of money, or an increase in the price of to outright malfunction, as often happens, the commodities. Inflation may indeed be dangerous resulting losses for prerequisite services are for a society, but balancing mechanisms may be put socialized while profits remain private. into place (such as the sliding-scale mechanism Fourth manipulation: Workers are paid too mud~ used in Italy until 1984, when it was cancelled we have been living above and beyond our means. We under yet another glorious neoliberal "reform"). must be paid less in order to become more competitive. The true danger for social life is deflation, which The preceding decades have witnessed a drastic leads to recession and the reduction of the social cut in actual wages, while profits have skyrocketed. machine's productive potential. Owners of capital, In successfully leveraging the threat of job transfer rather than seeing the value of their money to newly industrialized countries where the cost of diminish, prefer provoking recession and wide­ work hovers at near-slavery levels and conditions, spread social misery. The European bank prefers western workers' salaries have been severely creating recession, misery, unemployment, poverty, reduced along with the capitalist's production barbarianism, and violence, rather than abdicating costs. Debt has been favored in any and all forms the restrictive rules of the Maastricht Treaty, which in order to entice people to purchase otherwise prevent it from easily printing money, giving society unsellable merchandise and goods. All of this has space to breathe, and redistributing wealth. In order induced a cultural and political process of pushing to manufacture an artificial fear of inflation, the forms of social agency into a condition of depend­ ghost of Germany's inflation cycle of the 1920s ency (debt is an agent within the unconscious {justly feared by the Germans) is invoked, as if enabling guilt and a consequent drive for atone­ inflation itself were the cause of Nazism, and not ment), and at the same time has rendered the the manner in which inflation was managed by entire societal system vulnerable and fragile, exposing German and international capitalists of the time. it to repeated collapse as witnessed in the frequent Everything is crumbling-it's crystal clear. The economic bubble "boom and crash" cycles. measures that the financial class are forcing on Fifth manipulation: Inflation is our preeminent European countries are the exact opposite of"solu­ danger, and the Central European Bank has only one tions": they can only multiply the scale and effects goal, to oppose inflation at any cost. of the disaster. It's called a financial "rescue," but it's

46 I The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance The European Collapse I 4 7 a strange form of rescue, designed to slash salaries the four nights of rage in the suburbs of England. (thereby reducing future demand), cut spending on Insurrection will expand and proliferate in the social infrastructure, destroy public schools, and upcoming months, yet it will not be a lighthearted contract present and future productive capacity, underraking, nor will it be a linear process of social thereby inducing an immediate recession. The way emancipation. events have unfolded in Greece perfectly demon­ Society has been broken up, rendered fragile strates these facts: the European financial rescue has and fragmented by thirty years of perpetual pre­ destroyed its productive capacity, privatized its carization, uncontrolled and rampant competition, public structures, and demoralized its population. and psychic poisoning produced and controlled by Greece's Gross Domestic Product has dropped by the likes of Rupert Murdoch, Silvio Berlusconi, seven percent in one year alone, with no signs of and their criminal media empires. recovery. Rescue loans are administered at such There will be little cheer in the coming insur­ high rates of interest that Greece can only sink rection, which will often be marked by racism further into debt and endure an increasing sense of and self-defeating violence. This is the unfortunate guilt, misery, and hatred toward Europe. And now effect of the ·long process of desolidarization the Greek "rescue" is being applied to Portugal, which neoliberalism and the criminal political Spain, Ireland, and Italy. Its only effect will be a left have subjected society to for decades through massive transfer of resources and wealth from these their incessant proliferation and fragmentation countries to the ruling financial class. Austerity will of work. not reduce deficits. On the contrary, it will lead to In the upcoming years we can expect the dif­ deflation, as well as the reduction of production fusion of widespread ethnic civil war, as already and wealth, provoking further debt and consequent witnessed in the dust of the English revolt and the borrowing to the point where the European castle outbursts of violence in Birmingham. No one will will be forced to crumble. be able to stop or guide the insurrection, which Resistance movements must be prepared. will function as a chaotic reactivation of the ener­ Revolt is winding its way through European cities, gies of the body of the socius, which has for too having taken concrete shape in Rome, Athens, and long been flattened, fragmented, and lobotomized. London on December 14, 2010; and later in the The task of resistance movements will not be to acampada protests of May and June in Spain, and provoke, but rather to create (coextensively with

48 I Tl~e Up'iS•n;?: On Pootr,• and Frnan-::e TI•e European Coii3JCSe I 49 the insurrection) autonomous structures for trying to reaffirm and reinforce measures that have knowledge, existence, survival, psychotherapy, and already failed. giving life meaning and autonomy. This wi ll be a The European collapse is exposing the agony of long and potentially traumatic process. capitalism. The flexibility of the system is over, no Europe must overcome Maasrrichr in order ro margins are left. If society is to pay the debt of the be reinvented. Debt must be disowned just as must banks, demand has to be reduced, and if demand be the measures which cause and feed ir. The fall is reduced, growth will not follow. of Maastricht is perilous, yet unavoidable, as it will Nowadays, it's difficult to see a consistent inevitably open the doors to nationalism and project in the frantic action of the leading class. violence. Yet Europe, as it stands, can no longer be "No future" culture has taken hold of the capitalist defended. Resistance movements must rearriculate brain, and the origin of this capitalist nihilism is European discourse through social solidarity, to be found in the effect of deterritorializarion egalitarianism, rhe reduction of working rime, rhar is inherent ro global financial capitalism. the expropriation of capital conglomerates, the The relation between capital and society is cancellation of debt, and rhe abolition of borders dererritorialized, as economic power is no longer toward the construction of a postterrirorial politics. based on the property of physical things. The Europe must be pushed beyond Maastricht and bourgeoisie is dead, and the new financial class the Schengen Agreement and embrace a future has a virtual existence: fragmented, dispersed, form of the international. impersonal. The bourgeoisie, which was once in control of the economic scene of modern Europe, was a THE RIGHT TO INSOLVENCY AND THE DISENTANGLE­ strongly territorialized class, linked to material MENT OF THE POTENCY OF THE GENERAL INTELLECT assets; it could nor survive without relationships to territory and community. The financial class A Movement for the Reactivation of the Social Body which has taken the reins of the European political machine has no attachment either to territory or to The European leading class seems incapable of material production, because its power and wealth thinking in terms of the future. T hey are panicking are founded on the total abstraction of digital and, frightened by their own impotence, they are finance. This digital-financial hyperabstraction is

50 I The Upns ng: On Pceuy and Finance Tt1e European Collapse I 51 - liquidating the living body of the planet and the The protest movement has proliferated during social body of the workers' community. the last year. From London to Rome, from Athens Can it last? The European directorate that to New York, not to mention the North African emerged after the Greek crisis, in the absence of precarious workers who have been part of the any consultation of public opinion, has affirmed recent upheavals that are changing (for better or its own monopoly over decisions regarding the worse) the Arab world, this movement is targeting economies of the different countries approaching the financial powers and trying to oppose the default in 2011. It effectively divested parliaments effects of the financial assault on society. The of authority and replaced EU democracy with a problem is that peaceful demonstrations and business executive headed by the large banks. Can rotests have not been able to change the agenda the ECB-IMF-EU directorate impose a system of ~f the European Central Bank, as the national automatisms that secures EU members' compliance arliaments of the European countries are hostages with the process of public-sector wage reduction, ~f the Maastricht rules, which are financial auto­ layoffs of a third of all teachers, and so on? This matisms working as the material constitution of order of things can not last indefinitely, as the final the Union. Peaceful demonstrations are effective in collapse of the Union is the point of arrival of the the frame of democracy, but democracy is over spiral of debt-deflation-recession-debt that is already now that techno-financial automatisms have taken exposed in the Greek agony. the place of political decisions. Society was slow in reacting, as collective intel­ Violence is erupting here and there. The four ligence has been deprived of its social body, and nights of rage in the English suburbs and the the social body has been completely subjugated violent riots of Rome and Athens have shown that and depressed. Then, at the end of 2010, a wave it's possible for social protest to become aggressive. of protests and riots exploded in the schools and But violence, too, is unfit to change the course of universities, and now that wave is mounting things. Burning a bank is totally useless, as finan­ everywhere. But protests, demonstrations, and cial power is not in the physical buildings, but in riots seem unable to force a change in the politics the abstract connections between numbers, algo­ of the Union. Let's try to understand why, and let's rithms, and information. Therefore, if we want to also try to look for a new methodology of action discover forms of action which may be able to and a new political strategy for the movement. confront the present form of power, we have to

52 I n,e Upris,ng: On Poetry and F1na ncE: Tile European Col!aps_, I 53 start from the understanding that cognitive the breath and space of the other. Love is the ability labor is the main productive force creating the to enjoy myself thanks to your presence, to your techno-linguistic automatisms which enable eyes. This is solidarity. Because solidarity is based financial speculation. Following the example of on the territorial proximity of social bodies, you Wikileaks, we must organize a long-lasting process cannot build solidarity between fragments of time. of dismantling and rewriting the techno-linguistic I don't think that the English riots and the automatons enslaving all of us. Italian revolts and the Spanish acampada should be Social subjectivity seems weak and fragmented seen as consequential revolutionary forms, because against the backdrop of the financial assault. they are unable to really strike at the heart of Thirty years of the precarization of labor and power. They have to be understood as forms of the competition have jeopardized the very fabric of psycho-affective reactivation of the social body; social solidarity, and workers' psychic ability to they have to be seen as attempts to activate a living share time, goods, and breath made fragile. The relation between the social body and the general virrualization of social communication has eroded intellect. Only when the general intellect is able to the empathy between human bodies. reconnect with the social body will we be able to The problem of solidarity has always been crucial start a process of real autonomization from the grip in every process of struggle and social change. of financial capitalism. Autonomy is based on the ability to share daily life and to recognize that what is good for me is The Right to Insolvency good for you, and that what is bad for you is bad for me. Solidarity is difficult to build now that A new concept is emerging from the fog of the labor has been turned into a sprawl of recombinant present situation: the right to insolvency. We're not time-cells, and now that the process ofs ubjectivation going to pay the debt. has consequently become fragmentary, disempa­ The European countries have been obliged to thetic, and frail. accept the blackmail of the debt, but people are Solidarity has nothing to do with altruistic self­ rejecting the notion that we should have to pay for denial. In materialistic terms, solidarity is not a debt that we have not taken. about yo u, it's about me. Like love, solidari ty is not Anthropologist David Graeber, in his book about altruism: it is about the pleasure of sharing Debt: The First 5,000 Yem:r (2011), and philosopher

54 I Tt1e Upnsng: On Pcstry and Fna"lce The European Col'apse I 55 Maurizio Lazzara to, in The Making ofthe Indebted T his time, everything is happening almost Man (201 2), have inaugurated an interesting exactly the same way as las t time, just slightly out­ reflection on the cultural origin of the notion of of-sync, as happens with recurring dreams. Once debt, and the psychic implications of the sense of again, the balance of power in the world is shifting. guilt that this notion carries. The old empire is sinking, melancholically, and Additionally, in his essay "Recurring Dreams­ new powers are rushing in the race to the top. Just The Red H eart of Fascism," the young Anglo­ like before, their athletic screams are the powerful Italian thinker Federico Campagna pinpoints the ones of modernity. Growth! Growth! Growth! analogy berween the post-Versailles Congress years Their armies are powerful, their teeth shiny, their and the debt-obsessed present. hopes murderous and pure. Old powers look at them in fear, listening to their incomprehensible Last rime, it rook him decades to be born. First it languages like old people listen ro young people's was the war, and then, once it was over, it was music. (Campagna, 2011) debt, and all the ries that came with it. It was the rime of industrialization, the rime of modernity, T he burden of debt is haunting the European and everything came in a mass scale. Mass imagi nation of the future, and the U nion, which impoverishment, mass unemployment, hyper­ used to represent a promise of prosperity and inflation, hyper-populism. Nations were cracking peace, is turning into a blackmail and a threat. under the weight of what marxisrs used to call In response, the movement has launched the "contradictions," while capitalists were clinging slogan: Wei·e not going to pay the debt. T hese words to the brim of their top-hats, all waiting for the are deceiving at the moment, as in actuality we are sky to fall to earth. And when it fell, they threw already paying for the debt: the educational system themselves down after it, in the dozens, down has already been defl nanced and privatized, jobs have from their skyscrapers and their office blocks. been elimated, and so on. But these words are meant The air became electric, squares fill ed up, trees to change the social perception of the debt, creating a turned into banners and batons. It was the inter­ consciousness of its arbitrariness and moral illegitimacy. war period, and in rhe depth of the social body, T he right to insolvency is emerging as a new Nazism was still hidden, liquid and growing, key phrase and concept loaded with philosophical quiet like a fo etus. implications. The concept of insolvency implies

56 I TI1e Up1is ng: On Poetry and Finan::e The European Collapse I 57 -

not only a refusal to pay the financial debt, bur exchange for nothing. The concrete force of pro­ also, in a more subtle way, a refusal to submit the ductive labor is submitted to the unproductive, living potency of social forces to the formal domi­ and actually destructive, task of refinancing the nation of the economic code. fai led financial system. The reclamation of the right to insolvency implies If we may paradoxically cancel every mark of a radical questioning of the relation between the this financial semiotization, nothing would change capitalist form (Gestalt) and the concrete productive in the social machinery, nothing in our intellectual potency of social forces, particularly the potency of ability to conceive and perform. the general intellect. The capitalist form is not only a Communism does not need to be called out set of economic rules and functions, it is also the from the womb of the future; it is here, in our being, internalization of a certain set of limitations, of in the immanent life of common knowledge. psychic automatism, of rules for compliance. But the present situation is paradoxical­ Try to imagine for a second that the whole simultaneously exciting and despairing. Capitalism financial semiotization of European life disappears; has never been so close to its final collapse, but try to imagine that all of a sudden we stop organ­ social solidarity has never been so far from our izing daily life in terms of money and debt. daily experience. We must start from this paradox Nothing would change in the concrete, useful in order to build a postpolitical and postrevolu­ potentiality of society, in the contents of our tionary process of disentangling the possible from knowledge, in our skills and ability to produce. the existent. We should imagine (and consequently organize) the disentanglement of the living potentiality of the general intellect from the capitalist Gestalt­ EXHAUSTION: A SENILE UTOPIA FOR THE intended, first and foremost, as a psychic automa­ EUROPEAN INSURRECTION tism governing daily life. Insolvency means disclaiming the economic Financial Dictatorship code of capitalism as a transliteration of real life, as a semiotization of social potency and richness. Intellectuals like Jiirgen Habermas and Jacques The concrete, useful productive ability of the Derrida, among many others, have in the past social body is forced to accept impoverishment in stressed the refrain: "We need to create institutions

58 / TI1e Upnsing: On Poetl)l and F1nance The European Collapse I 59 for unified political decision at the level of the is fighting against one another. After the Greek European Union." crisis, the dogma of monetarism has been strongly In the aftermath of the Greek crisis, it seems reinforced, as if more poison could act as an anti­ that the Europhile intellectuals have gotten what dote. Reducing demand will lead to recession, and they have been asking for. The Euro entity has the only outcome will be a further concentration been subjected to an act of political decision and of capital in the hands of the financial class, and to a sort of political directorate which is enforcing the further impoverishment of labor. narrow obedience. Unfortunately, however, politics After the Greek financial crisis, emergency has taken this lead only in order to make the rule was declared. A self-proclaimed directorate, assessment that finance alone represents the true Merkel-Sarkozy-Trichet, imposed a deflationary leadership of the Union. policy, and is now going to impose it on the A political enforcement of finance's domination different national governments of Europe. In over European society has been the outcome so far order to save the financial system, this self-pro­ of this early stage of the European tragedy. claimed directorate is diverting resources from Welfare-state institutions have been under society to the banks. And in order to reaffirm attack for thirty years. Full employment, labor the failed philosophy of neoliberalism, social rights, social security, retirement, public school, spending is cut, salaries are lowered, retirement public transportation-all have been reduced, time is postponed, and young people's work is worsened, or destroyed. After thirty years of made precarious. neoliberal zeal, a collapse has occurred. Those who will not bend to the Great Necessity What will happen next? The leading class answers (Competition and Growth) will be out of the roughly: more of the same. Further reduction of game. Those who want to stay in the game will salaries for public workers, further postponement have to accept any punishment, any renunciation, of the retirement age. No respect for society's needs any suffering that the Great Necessity will or for the rights of workers. demand. Who said that we absolutely must be part Thatcher said thirty years ago that there is no of the game? such thing as society. Today, that echoes like a self­ The effect of the collapse of neoliberal politics has fulfilling prophecy. Society is in fact dissolving, so far been its own confirmation and consolidation. reducing public space to a jungle wherein everyone After the collapse of the American financial system,

60 I Ths Upns,ng: On Poetry ar:d Ftnanca everybody was expecting abandonment or at least explosions will be exploited by the repressive force attenuation of capital concentration, and a process of of the state. A deep change in social perception and revenue redistribution seemed possible in order to lifestyle will occur, and a growing portion of society increase demand. Nothing like this has happened. A will withdraw from the economic field, and stop Keynesian approach has not even been explored, and partaking in the game of work and consumption. Paul Krugman has been left alone to repeat very These people will abandon the script of individual reasonable things that nobody wants to hear. consumption; create new, enhanced forms of Thanks to the crisis, American society has been cohabitation; establish village economies in metro­ robbed for the benefit of big finance, and now polises; withdraw from the field of the market Europe is following the same dynamic, with a sort economy; and create community currencies. of mathematical ferocity. Unless they are seized by avarice-a psychotic Is there any chance of stopping this insane race? obsession-all that human beings want is a pleasant, A social explosion is possible, because the con­ possibly long life, and to consume only what is ditions of daily life will soon become unbearable. necessary to stay fit and make love. "Civilization" But labor precarity and the decomposition of is the pompous name we have given to every social solidarity may open the way to a frightening political and moral value that has made the pursuit outcome: ethnic civil war on a continental scale of such a lifestyle possible. and the dismantling of the Union, which would The financial dogma states the following: if unleash the worst passions of the nations. we want to keep partici paring in the game played In Paris, London, Barcelona, and Rome, mas­ in banks and stock markets, we must forfeit a sive demonstrations have erupted in protest against pleasant, quiet life. We must forfeit civilization. the restrictive measures, but this movement is not But why should we accept this exchange? Europe's going to stop the catastrophic freight train of wealth is not based on the stability of the euro on aggression bearing down on social life, because the international markets, or on managers' ability to European Union is not a democracy but rather a keep count of their profits. Europe is wealthy financial dictatorship whose politics is subjected to because it has millions of intellectuals, scientists, unquestionable decisions. technicians, doctors, and poets, and millions of Peaceful demonstrations will not be able to workers who have for centuries developed techni­ change the course of things, and predictable violent cal knowledge. Europe is wealthy because it has

62 I n-,e Upris:ng: On Poeiry ar.o F•ranc~ The European Collapse I 63 historically managed to valorize competence, not The European Union was born in the after­ just competition, and to welcome and integrate math of the Second World War, with the goal of cultures from afar. It is also wealthy, it must be forgetting our old nationalist and ideological pas­ said, because for four centuries it has ferociously sions. Here lies its progressive and pragmatic exploited the physical and human resources of nature. Forgetting romanticism is the categorical other continents. imperative of the Union. We must forfeit something, but what exactly? Lately, however, this foundational, antimytho­ Certainly, we must let go of the hypercon­ logical myth of the Union seems blurred, confused, sumption imposed on us by large corporations­ and forgotten because its apathetic perception of but not by the traditions of humanism, the being together was only possible in a condition of Enlightenment, and socialism, not by the ideals of prosperity. As long as the EU was able to guarantee freedom, civi l rights, and welfare. And I say this a growing level of consumption, as long as the not because I believe we should be attached to monetarist rule favored economic growth, the EU principles of the past, but because these principals could exist. What now? make it possible to live decently. The European Union is a fiction of democracy The prospect open to us is not a revolution. actually governed by an autocratic organism, the The concept of revolution no longer corresponds European Central Banlc While the Federal Reserve to anything, because it entails an exaggerated in the US is officially dedicated to the stability of notion of political will over the complexity of prices and full employment, the ECB charter contemporary society. Our prospect is a paradig­ declares only one goal: fighting inflation. Today this matic shift: to a new paradigm that is not centered goal is irrational, as defl ation is the prevailing trend. on product growth, profit, and accumulation, but Citizens can do nothing in order to influence on the full, unfolding of the power of collective the politics of the ECB, as the Bank does not intelligence. respond to political authority. This is why European citizens have been conscious of the Aesthetics of Europe vacuity of European elections. In the future they may come to view the Union as their enemy. The aesthetics of the European Union are frigid Social movements should try to change the by definition. landscape, and imagine the mythology for cultural

64 I Tne Ur:;nsn;r On Poetry ancl Fir\3Pce Tile Eu1 opean Collapse I 65 transition. We should focus on a foundational France, but around the turn of the twentieth myth of European history: the myth of energy. century, nationalism resurfaced in a responsive Modern culture and political imagination have form and began to express the self-affirmation of emphasized the virtues of youth--of young passion, young countries (Italy, Japa.n, and ~ermany), and of energy, aggressiveness, and growth. while the old empires (Russ1a, Austna and the Capitalism is based on the exploitation of physical Ottomans) were heading toward collapse. energy, and semio-capitalism has subjugated the Nationalism can also take a self-affirmative nervous energy of society to the point of collapse. form for the young generation at the cultural and The notion of exhaustion has always been economic level, as is evident in Italian futurism. anathema for the discourse of Modernity: Old-fashioned styles are devalued, old people and Romantik Sturm und Drang, the Faustian drive women despised because of their weakness. Fascism toward immortality, an endless thirst for economic depicts itself as the young age of the nations. growth, and profits. In late modernity, the rhetoric of the young and Organic limits have been denied, forgotten. the devaluation of the old becomes an essential The organic body of the Earth, and the entropy feature of advertising. Contrary to fascist discourse, inherent to human life, has been despised, con­ late-modern advertising does not abuse old age. It cealed, and segregated. denies it, claiming that every old person can be young The romantic cult of youth is the cultural if they will only rake part in the consumerist feast. source of nationalism. During the Romantic era, The fascism that triumphed in Italy after 1922 Europe was an emerging civilization which was can be seen as an ene1golatreia (energy worship) of securing political hegemony by conquering the rhe young. great Eastern civilizations. We should not forget Berlusconi's style is restaging arrogance, con- that at the end of the eighteenth century, India tempt for democratic rules, and machoism, bur and China were responsible for producing more rhe actors of the present comedy are old men who than seventy percent of the total global product of seek help from bio-rechniques, psycho-chemistry, the world. Their decline cannot be separated from and pharmacology. Denial of age and of time is Europe's ascent to domination. the ultimate delirium of the global class, as In the colonial age, nationalism was the cultural Norman Spinrad shows in his 1969 novel, Bug condition of colonial Empires like Britain and jack Barron.

66 I Tile Uprising: On Poetry and Finance The Eurooean Collapse I 67 r

Like the heroic mythology of fascist nationalism In the next decade, Europe will make a decisive (and a l s~ 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 about 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. How 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 autonomizati on 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.

68 I Tl~e Uoris.r~g· On Pcetry and Frnan::e The European Collapse I 69 The question that remains is: who says that 2 economic competition is the only standard and political criterion of choice? Bateson would define the European malaise in terms of a double-bind, LANGUAGE, ECONOMY, AND THE BODY or contradictory injunction. Neoliberal dogma is dictating European society to compete, and is simultaneously dictating the destruction of the structures constituting the cultural and productive condition of its wealth. The neoliberal idea of

wealth is advancing social misery more and more. THE FUTURE AFTER THE END OF THE ECONOMY Gregory Bateson suggests that double-binds have paradoxical outcomes. And the paradoxical Economic Science Is Not a Science solution for Europe could be to not fear decline. Decline (reverse growth) implies a divestment from At the close of the summer of 2011, the economic the frenzy of competition: this is the paradoxical newspapers were talking more and more of a "dou­ path that may bring us out of neoliberalism's ble dip." Economists predict there will be another double-bind. recession before there can be a recovery. I think they are wrong. There ·will be a reces­ sion-on that I agree-but there will never again be any recovery, if recovery means a renewal of growth. If you say this in public, you are regarded as a traitor, a wrecker, a doomsayer, and economists scorn you as a villain. But economists are not wise people. They should not even be considered scien­ tists. They are much more similar to priests, denouncing society's bad behaviors, asking you to repent for your debts, threatening inflation and misery for your sins, and worshipping the dogmas of growth and competition.

70 I The Upns.ng: On Pcetry and Frnance 71 It is difficult to believe that something like T he faculty and students of economics and "economic science" really exists. What is a science? business schools do not teach and learn subjects W ithout embarking on epistemological discus­ like physics or chemistry or astronomy, disciplines sions, I would simply say that science is a form of that deserve the title of scientific knowledge, and knowledge which is free of dogma, which is able to which each conceptualize a specific field of reality. extrapolate general laws from the observation of Economics faculty and students rather teach and empirical phenomena (and consequently able to study a technology, a set of tools, of procedures, of predict something about what will happen next), pragmatic protocols that are intended to force and finally which is able to understand those social reality into practical purposes: profits, accu­ kinds of changes that has labeled mulation, power. Economic reality does not exist, paradigm shifts. it is the result of a process of technical modeling, As far as I know, the discourse named "economics" submission, and exploitation. does not correspond to this schema. The theoretical discourse that supports the First of all, economists are beset with dogmatic economic technology can be defined as ideology, notions like growth, competition, and gross national in the sense proposed by Marx, who was not an product, and cl1ey determine that social reality is out economist, but a critic of political economy. of order when it is not matching these criteria. Ideology is in fact a theoretical technology Second, economists are totally unable to infer aimed at supporting special political and social laws from the observation of reality, as they prefer goals. And economics ideology, like all technologies, instead that reality harmonize with their pretended is not self-reflexive, and therefore is unable to laws. As a consequence, they are totally unable to develop a theoretical self-appreciation and to predict anything, as experience has shown over the reframe itself in relation to a paradigm shift. last three or four years. Finally, economists cannot understand what is Financial Deterritorialization and Labor Precariry happening when the social paradigm is changing, and strongly refuse to redefine their conceptual The development of productive forces, the creation framework because they pretend that reality has to of the global network of cognitive labor that in be changed in order for it to correspond to their "Fragment on Machines" ( ) Marx named outdated criteria. "general intellect," has provoked an enormous

Language. Economy. and the Body I 73 T increase in the productive potency of labor. This rather than a territorialized group of people) that is potency can no longer be semiotized, organized, and usually referred to as "financial markets." contained by the social form of capitalism. Labor is undergoing a parallel process of pul­ Capitalism is no longer able to semiotize and to verization and deterritorialization, that is call ed organize the social potency ofcog nitive productivity, precarity (or the precariousness of labor). Preca­ because value can no longer be defined in terms of rization is not only the loss of a regular job and a the average necessary time of labor, and therefore salary, bur it is also the effect of fragmentation and the old fo rms of private property and salary are no pulverization of work, the fracture in the relation­ longer able to semiotize and organize the deterrito­ ship between worker and territory. The cognitive rialized existence of capital and social labor. worker, in fact, does not need to be linked to a Economists are totally dazzled by this transfor­ place, and his or her activity can be diffused mation, as economic knowledge has always been throughout a nonphysical territory. structured according to the paradigm of bourgeois The old economic categories (salary, private capitalism: linear accumulation, measurability of property, and linear growth) no longer make sense value, and private appropriation ofs urplus value. T he in this new situation. The productivity of the shift from the industrial form of production to the general intellect, in terms of use value (of production semiotic form of production, the shift from physical of useful semiotic goods), is virtually unlimited. So labor to cognitive labor, has projected capitalism out how can semiotic labor be valued, when its products of itself, out of its ideological self-consciousness. are immaterial? H ow can the relationship between The bourgeoisie, which was a territorialized class work and salary be determined? How can we (the class of the bourg, of the city), was able to man­ measure value in terms of time, if the productivity age physical property, as well as a measurable relation of cognitive work (creative, affective, linguistic) between time and value. The utter financialization cannot be quantified and standardized? of capital marks the end of the old bourgeoisie, and opens the door to the deterritorialized and rhizo­ The End of Growth matic proliferation of economic power relations. Now the old bourgeoisie has no power anymore, The notion of growth is crucial in the conceptual having been replaced by a proliferating virtual class framework of the economic technology. If social (a deterritorialized and pulverized social dust, production does not comply with the economic

7 4 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. Language. Econom~·. and tne Body I 77 ~J ~ 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 fi ghting, 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 time. 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 fi nd 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. one. It will become a truth. An enigma is different, And the Greeks are angry and desperate. And so 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 about rhey are in a different mood-as are all Europeans, the relation between time and future 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 speaking 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 this 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. Debt is actually future your present rime as payment for rhe future 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) future: 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. There 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 published 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 yea rs 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 fa r 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 fe minine 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 Then 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 affirm 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 Chaplin 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, Charlie 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. , 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. He 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 fal l 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

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 precarious. This is the point where precariousness THE GENERAL INTELLECT IS LOOKING starts. At the point of disconnection between FOR A BODY language and the body.

ABSTRACTION AND PATHOLOGY

Three Levels ofAbstraction

In Marx's writings, abstraction is the main trend of capitalism, the general effect of capitalism on human activity. Marx means the abstraction of value from usefulness (use value), and the abstrac­ tion of productive work from concrete forms of human activity. But in the sphere of semio-capitalism, two new levels of abstraction appear, as developments of the Marxian abstraction. What does abstraction mean? When Marx talks about abstract labor, he is referring to the separation of a worker's activity from concrete usefulness, which is what happens under capitalism. The use-value of the worker's product is only a step toward the real thing, which is value, which is surplus value. So the capitalist does not care

103 10 2 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 you 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. The 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 Maurizio Lazzarato points out in his book they are separated from the bodies of children by The Making ofth e 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. Mothers 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 learning language in a framework space ofsoci al 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 first 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 deterritorialization of desire. In the traps In their book Les passions tristes (The sad pas­ of advertisi ng and consumerism, 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 deception 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 inves tment. 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 Clinton'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 immaterial substance (information), because

11 2 1 The Uprising: On Poetry ancl F•nance The General lntel•e,~t Is Looi

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 exci tement: 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 ofcontact. 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, but 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 territory and the work process employees spend theirs. They 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, Zuckerberg 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 Zuckerberg 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, from 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 sibility, 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 fac tory, the air. Being available to conjunction, the social organism Psychic organisms also interact with the infosphere, is open to affections, sensuous comprehension, the environment where info-stimulae circulate, and social solidari ty. Cultural flows-music and influencing psychic reactions. poetry, as well as psychotropic substances-can l 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 Guattari 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, Concatenate, Concatenate!" anthropological shift that we cannot yet fully under­ The principle of becoming lies in conjunctive stand. This shift involves a mutation ofthe 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 Conjunction 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. The 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 ofe lements 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 aesthetic fleld. The ethical disorder, pretation to human beings, a cognitive and psychic the inability to ethically manage individual and mutation is underway. collective life, seems 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

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 si nging in the night because it is afraid The main 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. territorialize 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. There 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 fil ters 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 res urfaces 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, not 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 ofJericho 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

•, 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 FINANCE 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 cui t 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)

134 Poetry and F1nanca I 135 The process of the auronomization of money is substance was broken. The matter of electric a particular level of this general trend, but it also money does not matter. (Shell 1982, I) has a long history, according to Marc Shell in Money, Language, and Thought. As I've already said, the dephysicalization of money is part of the general process of abstraction which Between rhe elecrrum money of ancient Lydia is the all-encompassing tendency of capitalism. and rhe electric money of contemporary Marx's theory of value is based on the concept America there occurred a historically momen­ of abstract work: because it is the source and the tous change. The exchange value of the earliest measure of value, work has to sever its relation coins derived wholly from the material sub­ to the concrete usefulness of its activity and stance (elecrrum) of rhe ingots of which rhe product. Concrete usefulness does not matter coins were made and nor from rhe inscriptions from the point of view of valorization. stamped into these ingots. The eventual devel­ Baudrillard speaks of the relation between signi­ opment of coins whose politically authorized fication and language in the same vein. The inscriptions were inadequate ro rhe weights and abstraction process at the core of the capitalist purities of rhe ingots into which the inscriptions capture (subsumption) of work implies abstraction were stamped precipitated awareness of quan­ from the need for the concreteness of products: the dries about the relationship between face value referent is erased. (intellectual currency) and substantial value (material currency). This difference between The rational, referential, historical and functional inscription and thing grew greater with the machines of consciousness correspond ro indusuial introduction of paper moneys. Paper, the mare­ machines. The aleatory, nonreferential, rrans­ rial substance on which the inscriptions were ferential, indeterminate and floating machines of printed, was supposed to make no difference in the unconscious respond to the aleatory machines exchange, and metal or elecrrum, rhe material of the code[... ] The systemic strategy is merely ro substance to which the inscriptions referred, was invoke a number of floating values in this hyper­ connected with those inscriptions in increasingly reality. This is true of the unconscious as it is of abstract ways. With the advent of electronic money and theories. Value rules according to rhe fund-transfers the link between inscription and indiscernible order of generation by means of

136 I The Upristng: On PoetJY and Ftnance Pcetry and Rn~nce I 137 models, according to the infin ite chains of simu­ The structural 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. Similarly, 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 nonreferential 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 new 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 from 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 The student struggles that have exploded in Europe silent dead: since the fall of 2010 should not 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 decade: a cognitarian 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 deployment of the 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." This concept redefines rhe mean the fac ul 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 environments 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 fu ture, 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 info rmation, and techno­ 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 infi nity 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:

146 1 The Upris,ng: On Poetry and Ftnance Poehy ana Ftnance I 14 7

. t.' -~ ' •.~·. i•' lovers, who never There is no secret meaning in these words, but Could achieve fulfillment here, could show we can read in these verses a description of the frail Their bold lofty figures of heart-swings, architectures of collective happiness: "Their towers Their towers of ecstasy. ofecstasy, their pyramid that long since, where there was no standing-ground were tremblingly propped together." Vagrants This place we don't know is the place we are But tell me, who are these vagrants, these even a little looking for, in a social environment that has been More transitory than we, these from the start impoverished by social precariousness, in a land­ Violently wrung (and for whose sake?) scape that has been deserted. It is the place that By a never-appeasable will? But it wrings them, will be able to warm the sensible sphere that has Bends them, slings them and swings them, been deprived of the joy of singularity. It is the Throws them and catches them; as if from an oily, place of occupation, where movements are gathering: More slippery air they come down Tahrir square in Cairo, Plaza do Sol in Madrid, On the carpet worn thinner by their eternal leaping, and Zuccotti Park in New York City. This carpet lost in the universe. We call poetry the semiotic concatenation that Stuck there like a plaster, as if the sky exceeds the sphere of exchange and the codified Of the suburb had hurt the earth. correspondence of the signifier and signified; it -Rilke: "Fifth Elegy," verses 1- 11 is the semiotic concatenation that creates new pathways of signification and opens the way to a These verses can be read simultaneously as a reactivation of the relation between sensibility and metaphor for the condition of precarity, and as an time, as sensibility is the faculty that makes possible annunciation of a place that we don't know, that the singularity of the enunciation and the singularity we have never experienced: a place of the city, a of the understanding of a noncodified enunciation. square, a street, an apartment where suddenly Viktor Shklovsky, the Russian formalist theorist, lovers, who here (in the kingdom of valorization says that the specificity of literary language lies in the and exchange) never "could achieve fulfillment," ability to treat words according to an unrepeatable toss their last ever-hoarded, ever hidden, unknown­ singular procedure, that in Russian he calls priem: to us-eternally valid coins of happiness. an artificial treatment of verbal matter generating

Poetry and F1Pance / 149 148 1 The Up•is ng: On Poetry a'ld Finat1::e effects of meaning never seen and codified before. sumption can be semiotized again, according to a Poetical procedure is a fo rm of enstrangement new system of world expectations. (ostranenie, in Russian) that carries the word far Changing the order ofe xpectations is one of the and away from its common use. main social transformations that a movement can "Art is not chaos," say Deleuze and Guattari in produce: this change implies a cultural transforma­ What Is Philosophy?, "bur a composition of chaos tion but also a change in sensitivity, in the opening that yields the vision or sensation, so that it con­ of the organism to the world and to the others. stitutes, as Joyce says, a chaosmos" (Deleuze and Insurrection is a refrain helping to withdraw the Guarrari 1994, 204-205). T he relation between psychic energies of society from the standardized the organism and the environment is disturbed by rhythm of compulsory competition-consumerism, the acceleration of info-stimula in the infosphere, and helping to create an autonomous collective by semiotic inflation, and by the saturation of sphere. Poetry is the language of the movement as attention and the conscious sensitive sphere of it tries to deploy a new refrain. subjectivity. Art is recording and detecting this disso nance, as it simultaneously creates the aes­ The Limits of the World thetic conditions for the perception and expres­ sion of new modes of becoming. In the chapter of Chaosmosis that is dedicated to the Relative to schizoanalysis, art is acting diffe r­ aesthetic paradigm, G uarrari speaks of the new ently in two ways: it represents a diagnostic of the modes of the submission and standardization ofs ub­ infospheric pollution of the psychosphere, but jec ti ~i ty produced by network technologies and by also a therapy treating the disturbed organism. neol1beral globalization. Simultaneously, he tries to The refrain is the sensitive niche where we can flnd new pathways to autonomous subjectivation. create cosmos elaborating chaos. As far as concerns the fl rst side of rhe problem, Social movements can be described as a form of he writes: refrain: movements are the refrain of singulariza­ tion, as they act to create spheres of singularity at Subjectivity is standardized through a commu­ the aesthetic and existential levels. nication which evacuates as m uch as possible In the process of singularization that the move­ trans-semiotic and amodal en unciative compo­ ment makes possible, production, need, and con- sitions. Thus it slips towards the p rogressive

150 1 The Upros•ng: On Poetry and F1nar.ce Poetry a• •0 Finar.c'" 151 effacement of polysemy, prosody, gesture, mimicry extrinsic references and coordinates, but from and posture, to the profit of a language rigorously where they re-emerge invested with new charges subjected to scriptural machines and their mass of complexity. It is during this chaosmic folding meclia avatars. In its extreme contemporary forms that an interface is installed-an interface it amounts to an exchange of information tokens between the sensible fi nitude of existential calculable as bits and reproducible on computers. Territories and the trans-sensible infinitude of In this type of deterritorialised assemblage, the the Universe of reference bound to them. Thus capitalist Signifier, a simulacrum of the imagi­ one oscillates, on the one hand, between a finite nary of power, has the job of overcoding all the world of reduced speed, where limits always loom other Universes of value. (Guattari 1995, 104-5) up behind limits, constraints behind constraints, systems of coordinates behind other systems of Digital technology is canceling the singular enun­ coordinates, without ever arriving at the ultimate ciative composition of polysemy, gesture, and tangent of a being-matter which recedes every­ voice, and tends to produce a language that is where and, on the other hand, Universes of infinite subjected to the linguistic machinery. While ana­ speed where being can't be denied anymore, where lyzing the standardization of language, Guattari it gives itself in its intrinsic differences, in its simultaneously looks for a line of escape from the heterogeneous qualities. The machine, every informational submission (assujettissement). species of machine, is always at the junction of the finite and infinite, at this point of negotiation An initial chaosmic folding consists in making between complexity and chaos. (Guanari 1995, the powers of chaos co-exist with those of the 110- 111) highest complexity. It is by a continuous coming­ and-going at an infinite speed that the multiplicities Guattari here ques tions the relation between the of entities differentiate into ontologically hetero­ finite and infinite in the sphere of language. He geneous complexions and become chaotised in is mapping the territory of the informational rhi­ abolishing their fi gural diversity and by zome, that was not yet completely discovered homogenising themselves within the same being­ when Chaosmosis was written. T he ambiguity of non-being. In a way, they never stop diving into the info-rhizomatic territory is crystal clear: an umbilical chaotic zone where they lose their info-technology is standardizing subjectivity and

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. potentiali ty 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 ofa 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 ofa 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 In 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 virtuality 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 ... (Guattari 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 projections 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 financial capitalism has created a cannot do, we cannot experience, we cannot live, closed reali ty 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 abili ty 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 Bei ng that lies automatisms of financial capitalism will make beyond the present limit. possible the emergence of a new life fo rm. 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, existential, 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 world of language. Grammar, logic, and ethics are IRONY AND CYNICISM 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 nature of language, and an ability to suspend the create and to skip and to shuffle meaning.

Poetry ancl Finance 1 159 158 / Tn"' Up~151ng: 0:1 Poetry and Finance relation between language and reality, particularly distinguish right from wrong, but he knows that in the ethical sphere. Cynicism, therefore, is closely nothing can be done to stop and defeat evil. related to irony. Both are rhetorical forms and Despite moral unhappiness, he must bend to evil ethical stances that require the suspension of the if he wants to survive. relation between reality and language. Some At the end of a century that believed in the German philosophers, like Paul Tillich and Peter future, zynismus seems to be the only accepted Sloterdijk, use two different words to distinguish language, the only cool behavior. "Cool" is a keyword the ancient Greek cynicism discussed by Foucault in contemporary cynicism. Andre Glucksmann, in and our own: kynismus and zynismus. his 198 1 book Cynicism and Passion, suggests that Modern zynismus can be understood by recalling the only alternative to cynicism is passion, but Stanley Kubrick's 1999 film, Eyes Wide Shut, an that's wrong. artistic gravestone to the modern illusion of pro­ T he real alternative to cynicism is not passion, gressive Enlightenment. Bill and Alice, a happily but irony. married couple (Fridolin and Albertine in Arthur In Critique of Cynical Reason, Peter Sloterdijk Schnitzler's novel Dream Story [ 1926], which argues that cynicism is the prevailing mindset inspired Kubrick's screenplay) are expressions of throughout the post-'68 era. To Sloterdijk, cynicism an awareness that truth can never be spoken doesn't denote an exceptional social character: it because the social game is based on the power of is the typical state of mind. As he describes the lies. If you don't accept the language of deceit, no ancient notion of cynicism, "It violates normal one will listen to you. This is where Kubrick's sur­ usage to describe cynicism as a universal and vey of the twentieth century arrives. It began with diffuse phenomenon; as it is commonly con­ Dax: the upright colonel played by Kirk Douglas, ceived, cynicism is not diffuse but striking, not who fights the cowardice of military power in universal but peripheral and highly individual." Paths of Gl01y (1957). Dax believes in ethical (Sioterdijk 1988, 4) And this is the most impor­ righteousness. He has the strength and courage to tant difference between kynismus and zynismus: oppose evil because he thinks that evil can be while D iogenes and his fellow kynicists were stopped and defeated. ascetic individualists rejecting the acquiescence to Bill Harford (played by Tom Cruise) in Eyes the law of the powerful, the modern zynicists are Wide Shut is still able to recognize misdeeds and the conformist majority, fully aware that the law

160 1 n.e Upris•ng: On Poetry ana Fi11anc€: T

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 Marxists 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 fo r 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 language; 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 dominance 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 ment 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 fi er 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 ironic act, arrive at a common cynicism (zynismus) has to do with aggression, both autonomy from the dictatorship of the signified.

166 / The Upris1ng: On P0Bt1y and F1nance Poetry and Finance I 167 T I

Sleep inescapable realicy of power, particularly the power of the economy. In the '70s, while reading Deleuze and Guattari, Irony is an opening of a game of infinite pos­ the consciousness of the autonomous movement sibilities; cynicism is a dissociation of ethics and discovered that reality has no meaning: the meaning possibilicy. The cynical mood starts from the idea of reality has to be created by the movement itself. that ethical action has no possi bilicy of succeeding. So the autonomous movement broke free of the The ironist sleeps happily because nothing can idea that the ethical horizon is marked by historical awake her from her dreams. The cynicist sleeps a necessity, and opened its mind to the ironic mood, light sleep, he dreams nightmares, and he gets up which means singularization of ethical responsibility as soon as power calls him. and political choice. In this (postdialectical) space of moral indetermination, both linguistic enunciation and political action are devoid of any ontological foundation. The will of power and research of the good, which were linked in the framework of historical ideology, are now diverging. Here the fork of irony and cynicism opens. Irony suspends the semantic value of the signi­ fier and chooses freely among a thousand possible interpretations. The ironic interpretation implies and presupposes a common ground of understanding among the interlocutors, a sympathy among those who are involved in the ironic act, and a common autonomy from the dictatorship of the signified. Cynicism starts from the same suspension, but is a slavish modulation of irony: irony at the service of power. While irony does not postulate the existence of any reality, cynicism postulates the

168 1 The Uprising: On Pcetry and Finance l I

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