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Poetry is the language of nonexchangeability,the return of infinite hermeneutics, and thereturn of the sensuous body of language. I'mtalking about poetry here as an excess of language,a hidden resource which enables us to shift fromone paradigm to another.l llll ll ll lllllll ll\ll lli~i[liliilll~llllllli~[l lllll lll\1 11111 l~ Ill\310212 3128 2902 31 ..,., ' """" ._,I IV IJQI Q l \;AThe Uprisingon Poetry and Finance'II~002021.8472012AC/Meint(e)n

Franco "Bifo" BerardiSEMIOTEXT(E) INTERVENTION SEIUES© 2012 by Franco "Bifo" BerardiThe UprisingAll rights reserved. No parr of this book may be reproduced,srored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic,mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,without prior permission of the publisher.On Poetry and FinancePublished by Semiorext(e)2007 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 427, Los Angeles, CA 90057www.semiorexte.comEarlier versions of portions of this book were published in theweb-magazine e-jlux in spring 20 II.Thanks to Roberr Dewhurst, John Eben, Marc Lowenthal andJason Smith.Design: Hedi El KholtiISBN: 978-1-58435-112-2Distributed by The M IT Press, Cambridge, Mass.and London, EnglandPrinted in the United Stares of America109 8765432semiotext(e)interventionseries o 14

ContentsInt roduction 71. The European Collapse 232. Languag e, Economy, and t he Body 713. The Genera l Intellect Is Looking for a Body 1034. Poetry and Finance 134References 171

--- . ..,,... +\"IIntroductionThese texts were written in 201 1, the first year ofthe European uprising, when European societyentered into a deep crisis that seems to me muchmore a crisis of social imagination than mereeconomics. Economic dogma has taken hold ofthe public discourse for three decades, and hasdestroyed the critical power of political reason.The collapse of the global economy has exposedrhe dangers of economic dogmatism, bur irsideology has already been incorporated into theauromarisms of living society.Political decision has been replaced by technolinguisticauromatisms embedded in the interconnectedglobal machine, and social choices aresubmitted to psychic automatisms embedded insocial discourse and in the social imaginary.Bur the depth of the catastrophe represented byrhe collapse is awakening hidden potencies of rhesocial brain. The financial collapse marks thebeginning of an insurrection whose first glimpses7

were seen in London, Athens, and Rome inDecember 2010, and which became massive in theMay-June acampada in Spain, in the four Augustnights of rage in the English suburbs, and in thewave of strikes and occupations in the US.The European collapse is not simply the effectof a crisis that is only economic and financialthisis a crisis of imagination about the future, aswell. The Maastricht rules have become unquestionabledogmas, algorithmic formulae and magicalspells guarded by the high priests of the EuropeanCentral Bank and promoted by stockbrokersand advisors.Financial power is based on the exploitation ofprecarious, cognitive labor: the general intellect inits present form of separation from the body.The general intellect, in its present configuration,is fragmented and dispossessed of self-perceptionand self-consciousness. O nly the conscious mobilizationof the erotic body of the general intellect,only the poetic revitalization of language, willopen the way to the emergence of a new form ofsocial autonomy.IrreversibilityIt's difficult for someone of my generation to breakfree of the intellectual automatism of the dialecticalhappy ending.Just as the Vienna Congress's restoration wasfollowed by the People's Spring in 1848, just asfascism was followed by resistance and liberation,so now the political instinct of my generation (the'68 generation, the last modern generation, in asense) is expecting the restoration of democracy,the return of social solidarity, and the reversal offinancial dictatorship.T his expectation may be deceptive, and weshould be able to enhance the space of our historicalprefiguration, so as to become able to abandon theconceptual framework of historical progress, andto imagine the prospect of irreversibility. In thesphere of the current bio-economic totalitarianism,the incorporation of techno-linguistic automatismsproduced by semio-capital has produced aform that is not an external domination that actson the body, but a mutation of the social organismitself. This is why historical dialectics no longerwork at the level of understanding the processand the prospects: the prospect of irreversibilityis replacing the prospect of subversion, so wehave ro rethink the concept of autonomy fromthis perspective."Irreversibility" is a taboo word in modernpolitical discourse, because it contradicts the principleof rational government of the flow ofevents-which is the necessary condition ofrational government, and the primary contribution8 I The Upns1ng: On Poetry and Finanr:celn!loduction I 9

of humanism to the theory and the practice ofmodern politics. Machiavelli speaks of the Princeas a male force who is able to subdue fortuna(chance, the chaotic flow of events), the femaleside of history.What we are experiencing now, in the age ofinfinite acceleration of the infosphere, is thefollowing: feminine fortuna can no longer be subjectedand domesticated by the masculine force ofpolitical reason, because fortuna is embodied in thechaotic flows of the overcrowded infosphere and inthe chaotic flows of financial microtrading. Thedisproportion between the arrival rate of newinformation and the limited time available forconscious processing generates hypercomplexity.Therefore projects that propose to rationallychange the whole social field are out of the picture.The horizon of our time is marked by theFukushima event. Compared to the noisy catastrophesof the earthquake and the tsunami, Tokyo'ssilent apocalypse is more frightening and suggests anew framework of social expectation for daily life onthe planet. The megalopolis is directly exposed tothe Fukushima fallout, but life is proceeding almostnormally. Only a few people have abandoned thecity. Most citizens have stayed there, buying mineralwater as they have always done, breathing with facemasks on their mouths as they have always done.A few cases of air and water contamination aredenounced. Concerns about food safety haveprompted US officials to halt the importation ofcertain foods from Japan. Bur the Fukushima effectdoes not imply a disruption of social life: poison hasbecome a normal feature of daily life, the secondnature we have to inhabit.During the last few years disruptions have multipliedin the planetary landscape, but they havenot produced a change in the dominant paradigm,a conscious movement of self-organization, or arevolutionary upheaval.The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has not ledto the eviction of BP, it has rather consolidated itspower, because BP was the only force which couldmanage the disruption and hopefully bring itunder control.The financial collapse of September 2008 didnot lead to a change in US economic politics.Despite the hopes raised by Barack Obama's victory,the financial class did not relax its grip onthe economy.In Europe, after the Greek crisis in 2010,neoliberal ideology-although clearly the source ofthe collapse-has not been dismissed. On thecontrary, the Greek disruption (and the followingIrish and Italian and Spanish and Portuguesedisruptions) has strengthened the rigor of monetaristpolicies and stressed the prospect of reducingsalaries and social spending.10 I The Uoris.ng: On Pcetr>• and Frnanceln!roductron I 11

At a systemic level, change is taking the form ofpositive feedback.In his work on cybernetics, Norbert Wienerspeaks of negative feedback in order to define theoutput of a system when it acts to oppose changesto the input of the system, with the result that thechanges are reduced and attenuated. If the overallfeedback of the system is negative, then the systemwill tend to be stable. In the social field, forinstance, we can say that the system is exhibitingnegative feedback if protests and fights oblige theindustry to increase salaries and reduce exploitationwhen social misery becomes too hard and toowidespread.In Wiener's parlance, a system exhibits positivefeedback when, on the contrary, it increases themagnitude of a perturbation in response to theperturbation itself. Obviously, unintended positivefeedback may be far from being "positive" in thesense of desirable. We can also speak of selfreinforcingfeedback.My impression is this: in conditions of infoaccelerationand hypercomplexity, as the consciousand rational will becomes unable to check and toadjust the trends, the trends themselves becomeself-reinforcing up to the point of final collapse.Look at the vicious circle: right-wing electoralvictories and dictatorships of ignorance. Whenright-wing parties win, their first preoccupationis to impoverish public schooling and to prop upmedia conformism. The result of the spread ofignorance and conformism will be a new electoralvictory, and so on. This is why it is difficult notto see the future of Europe as a dark blend oftechno-financial authoritarianism and aggressivepopulist reaction. .Autonomy, in this condition, will be essentiallythe ability to escape environments where thepositive feedback is switched on. How is it possibleto do that, when we know that the planetaryenvironment and global society are increasinglysubjected to this catastrophic trend?How can we think of a process of subjectivationwhen precarity is jeopardizing social solidarityand when the social body is wired by technolinguisticautomatisms which reduce its activityto a repetition of embedded patterns of behavior?With this book, I am trying to develop thetheoretical suggestions of Christian Marazzi, PaoloVirno, and Maurizio Lazzarato in an unusualdirection. These thinkers have conceptualized therelation between language and the economy, anddescribed the subsumption and the subjugationof the biopolitical sphere of affection and languageto financial capitalism. I am looking for a wayto subvert this subjugation, and I try to do thatfrom the unusual perspectives of poetry andsensibility.12 I The Upris;ng: On Poetry and F1nar.cetntrccluction I 13

SwarmWhen the social body is wired by techno-linguisticautomatisms, it acts as a swarm: a collective organismwhose behavior is autom atically directed byconnective interfaces.A mulritude is a plurality of conscious andsensitive beings sharing no common intentionality,and showing no common pattern of behavior. Thecrowd shuffling in the city moves in countlessdifferent directions with countless different morivations.Everybody goes their own way, and theintersection of those displacements makes a crowd.Sometimes the crowd moves in a coordinated way:people run together towards the station becausethe train is soon expected to leave, people stoptogether at traffic lights. Everybody moves followinghis or her will, within the constraints of socialinterdependency.If we want to understand something moreabout the present social subjectivity, the concept ofthe multitude needs to be complemented with theconcepts of the network and swarm.A network is a plurality of organic and artificialbeings, of humans and machines who performcommon acrions thanks to procedures that makepossible their interconnection and interoperation.If you do not adapt to these procedures, if youdon't follow the technical rules of the game, youare not playing the game. If you don't react tocertain stimuli in the programmed way, you don'tform part of the network. The behavior of personsin a network is not aleatory, like the movements ofa crowd, because the network implies and predisposespathways for the networker.A swarm is a plurality of living beings whosebehavior follows (or seems to follow) rules embeddedin their neural systems. Biologists call a swarma multitude of animals of similar size and bodilyorientation, moving together in the same directionand performing actions in a coordinated way, likebees building a hive or moving toward a plantwhere they can find resources for making honey.In conditions of social hypercomplexity, humanbeings tend to act as a swarm. When the infosphereis too dense and too fast for a conscious elaborationof information, people tend to conform to sharedbehavior. In a letter to John Seabrook, Bill Gateswrote: "the digital revolution is all about facilitationcrearingtools to make things easy" (Seabrook,52). In a broader sense, we may say that in thedigital age, power is all about making things easy.In a hypercomplex environment that cannot beproperly understood and governed by the individualmind, people will follow simplified pathways andwill use complexity-reducing interfaces.This is why social behavior today seems to betrapped into regular and inescapable patterns of14 I The Upnsing: On Poetry ar.cJ F1nanceIntroduction I 15

interaction. Techno-linguistic procedures, financialobligations, social needs, and psycho-media invasion-all this capillaric machinery is framing thefi eld of the possible, and incorporating commoncognitive patterns in the behavior of social actors.So we may say that social life in the semiocapitalsphere is becoming a swarm.In a swarm it is not impossible to say "no." It'sirrelevant. You can express your refusal, your rebellionand your nonalignment, but this is not goingto change the direction of the swarm, nor is itgoing to affect the way in which the swarm's brainis elaborating information.Automation of LanguageThe implication of language in the financialeconomy is crucial in the contemporary processof subjectivation.In this book, I am trying to think about theprocess of emancipating language and affects, andI start from the concept of insolvency.Insolvency is not only a refusal to pay the costsof the economic crisis provoked by the financialclass, but it is also a rejection of the symbolic debtembodied in the cultural and psychic normalizationof daily life. Misery is based on the culturalconformism of the nuclear family, on the secludedprivacy of individual existence. Privatization ofneeds and affects has subjected social energies tothe chain of capitalist culture. The history ofcapitalist domination cannot be dissociated fromthe production and privatization of need- i.e.,the creation of cultural and psychic habits ofdependence. Social insolvency means independencefrom the list of priorities that capitalist conformismhas imposed on society.From a linguistic and affective point of view,insolvency is the line of escape from the reductionof language to exchange.The connective sign recombines automaticallyin the universal language machine: the digitalfinancialmachine that codifies existential flows.The word is drawn into this process of automation,so we find it frozen and abstract in the disempatheticlife of a society that has become incapable ofsolidarity and autonomy. The automation of theword takes place on two levels.The first level concerns monetarization andsubjection to the financial cycle: signs fall underthe domination of finance when the financialfunction (the accumulation of value throughsemiotic circulation) cancels the instinctual sideof enunciation, so that what is enunciated m aybe compatible with digital-financial formats.The production of meaning and of value takesthe form of parthenogenesis: signs produce signswithout any longer passing through the flesh.16 I The Upns1ng: On Poetry and F1nanr:-eIntroduCtiOn I 17

Monetary value produces more monetary valuewithout being first realized through the materialproduction of goods.A second level is indexicalization. In his papertitled "Quand les mots valent de !'or," FredericKaplan speaks of the process of language's indexicalizationin the framework of Internet searchengines. Two algorithms define the reduction oflinguistic meaning to economic value via a Googlesearch: the first finds the various occurrences of aword, the second links words with monetary value.The subsumption of language by the semiocapitalistcycle of production effectively freezes theaffective potencies of language.The history of this subsumption passes throughthe twentieth century, and poetry predicted andprefigurated the separation of language from theaffective sphere. Ever since Rimbaud called for adereglement de to us les sens, poets have experimentedwith the forgetting of the referent and with theautonomous evocation of the signifier.The experience of French and Russian symbolismbroke the referential-denotative link between theword and the world. At the same time, symbolistpoets enhanced the connotational potency of languageto the point of explosion and hyperinclusion.Words became polysemous evocations for otherwords, and thus became epiphanic. This magic ofpostreferential language anticipated the generalprocess of dereferentialization that occurred whenthe economy became a semio-economy.The financialization of the capitalist economyimplies a growing abstraction of work from its usefulfunction, and of communication from its bodilydimension. As symbolism experimented with theseparation of the linguistic signifier from its denotationaland referential function, so financialcapitalism, after internalizing linguistic potencies,has separated the monetary signifier from its functionof denotation and reference to physical goods.Financial signs have led to a parthenogenesis ofvalue, creating money through money without thegenerative intervention of physical matter andmuscular work. Financial parthenogenesis sucksdown and dries up every social and linguisticpotency, dissolving the products of human activity,especially of collective semiotic activity.The word is no longer a factor in the conjunctionof talking affective bodies, but a connector of signifyingfunctions rranscodified by the economy. Oncedeprived of its conjunctive ability, the word becomesa recombinant function, a discreet (versus continuous)and formalized (versus instinctual) operator.In 1977 the American anthropologist RoseKhon Goldsen, in The Show and Tell Machine,wrote the following words: "We are breeding a newgeneration of human beings who will learn morewords from a machine than from their mothers."18 I The Upris•ng: On Poetry and F:nancelntroouction I 19

That generation is here. The connective generationentering the social scene today fully suffers thepathogenic and disempathetic effects of theautomation of the word.Poetry and the Deautomation of LanguageWe have too many things and not enough forms.-Gustave Flauberc, Prifoce a Ia vie d'ecrivainFonn fascinates when one no longer has the force tounderstand force from within itself-Jacques Derrida, Writing and DifferenceThe voice and poetry are two strategies for reactivation.Once poetry foresaw the abandonment ofreferentialicy and the automation of language;now poetry may scare the process of reactivatingthe emotional body, and therefore of reactivatingsocial solidarity, starting from the reactivation ofthe desiring force of enunciation.For Giorgio Agamben, in Language and Death,the voice is the point of conjunction betweenmeaning and flesh. The voice is the bodily singularityof the signifying process, and cannot bereduced to the operational function of language,notwithstanding the research in protocols andprocedures for vocal recognition.Poetry is the voice of language, in this sense: itis the reemergence of the deictic function (fromdeixis, self-indication) of enunciation. Poetry is thehere and now of the voice, of the body, and of theword, sensously giving birch to meaning.While the functionaliry of the operationalword implies a reduction of the ace of enunciationco connective recombinabilicy, poetry is theexcess of sensuousness exploding into the circuitryof social communication and opening again thedynamic of the infinite game of interpretation:desire.In the incrodution co the first volume of hisseminal book Du Sens, Algirdas Julien Greimasspeaks of interpretation as an infinite slippage ofthe transition from signifier to signified.This infinite slippage (or slide, or drift) is basedon the intimate ambiguity of the emotional side oflanguage {language as excess movement).We have co stare a process of deautomating theword, and a process of reactivating sensuousness(singularity of enunciation, the voice) in the sphereof social communication.Desire is monstruous, it is cruel, and noncomplianceand nonrecombinabilicy are at the inmostnature of singularity. Singularity cannot be compliantwith a finite order of interpretation, but it can becompassionate with the infinite ambiguity ofmeaning as sensuous understanding. Compassion20 I The Upris'ng: On Poetry and FJnanceIntroductiOn I 21

is sensibility open to the perception of uncountablesensuous beings, the condition for an autonomousbecoming-other, beyond the financial freeze,beyond the techno-linguistic conformism that ismaking social life a desert of meaning.Poetic language is the insolvency in the field ofenunciation: it refuses the exaction of a semioticdebt. Deixis (oei~t~) acts against the reduction oflanguage to indexicalization and abstract individuation,and the voice acts against the recombinantdesensualization of language.Poetic language is the occupation of the space ofcommunication by words which escape the orderof exchangeability: the road of excess, says W illiamBlake, leads to the palace of wisdom. And wisdomis the space of singularity, bodily signification, thecreation of sensuous meaning.THE EUROPEAN COLLAPSETHE FINANCIAL BLACK HOLE AND THEVAN ISHING WORLDFinance is the most abstract level of economicsymbolization. It is the culmination of a process ofprogressive abstraction that starred with capitalistindustrialization. Marx speaks of abstract laborin the sense of an increased distancing of humanactivity from its concrete usefulness. In h iswords, capitalism is the application of humanskills as a means to obtain a more abstract goal: theaccumulation of value. Nevertheless, in the age ofindustrialization analyzed by Marx, the productionof useful goods was still a necessary step in theprocess of valorization itself. In order to produceabstract value, the industrial capitalist was obligedto produce useful things. This is no longer the casetoday, in the sphere of semio-capital. In the worldof financial capitalism, accumulation no longerpasses through the production of goods, but goes22 1 Tne Upnsin::r On Postr; and F1nance23

straight to its monetary goal, extracting value fromthe pure circulation of money, from the virrualizationof life and intelligence.' Financialization and the virtualization ofhuman communication are obviously intertwined:thanks to the digitalization of exchanges, financehas turned into a social virus that is spreadingeverywhere, transforming things into symbols. Thesymbolic spiral of financialization is sucking downand swallowing up the world of physical things,of concrete skills and knowledge. \ The concretewealth of Europeans is vanishing into a black holeof pure financial destruction. Nothing is createdfrom this destruction, while the financial class isexpropriating the outcome of the general laborforce and of the general intellect.Jean Baudrillard likened the ever growing USnational debt to a missile orbiting above the earthlyatmosphere.An electronic billboard in Times Square displaysthe American public debt, an astronomic figureof some thousands of billions of dollars whichincreases at a rate of $20,000 a second. [ ... ] Infact, the debt will never be paid. No debt willever be paid. The final counts will never takeplace. [ ... ] The United States is already virtuallyunable to pay, but this will have no consequencewhatsoever. There will be no judgment day forthis virtual bankruptcy. [ ... ] When one looks atthe billboard on Broadway, with its flying figures,one has the impression that the debt takes off toreach the stratosphere. This is simply the figure inlight years of a galaxy that vanishes in the cosmos.The speed of liberation of the debt is just like oneof earth's satellites. That's exactly what it is: thedebt circulates on its own orbit, with its owntrajectory made up of capital, which, from nowon, is free of any economic contingency andmoves about in a parallel universe (the accelerationof capital has exonerated money of its involvementswith the everyday universe of production, valueand utility). It is not even an orbital universe: it israther ex-orbital, ex-centered, ex-centric, withonly a very faint probability that, one day, itmight rejoin ours. (Baudrillard 1996)!In the last few years, contrary to Baudrillard'sprediction, the probability that he considered veryfaint has become true. Debt has come back downto Earth, and it is now acting as a condition for thefinal predatory abstraction: life turned into timefor repaying a metaphysical debt. Life, intelligence,joy, breathing- humanity is going to be sacrificedin order to pay the metaphysical debt. 1In the last decades of the century that trustedin the future, marked by the political hegemonyof neoliberal dogma, the invisible hand has been24 I TI1e Uprising: On Poeir)' and Fina11ceThe European Collapse I 25

embedded in the global technology of the linguisticmachine, and language, the essential environmentof mankind, has been turned into a wired, automatedsystem.The essential processes of social communicationand production have escaped the capacities ofhuman knowledge and control. Irreversible trendsof devastation, pollution, and impoverishment aremarking the horizon of our time.Slavoj Ziiek reminds us that no end of theworld is in sight, only the possible end of capitalismthat we are unable to imagine. Ziiek may beright, but we should consider the eventualitythat capitalism has so deeply pervaded everyphysical and imaginary dimension of the worldthat its collapse may lead to the end of civilizationitself.The financialization of the economy is essen~tially to be seen as a process of the subsumption ofthe processes of communication and productionby the linguistic machine. The economy hasbeen invaded by immaterial semiotic flows andtransformed into a process of linguistic exchange;simultaneously, language has been captured bythe digital-financial machine, and transformedinto a recombination of connective operationalsegments. The techno-linguistic machine that isthe financial web is acting as a living organism, andits mission is drying up the world.1 want to understand the process of dissolutionthat is underway from the unusual point of view ofthe relationship between poetry and finance. ~athas poetry to do with finance, and finance wuhpoetry? Nothing, of course. Investors, stockholders,and bankers are usually too busy, so they don'twaste their time with poetry. Poets are too poor toinvest money in the stock market. There are exceptions,like T. 5. Eliot, who was employed at theLloyds Bank while writing The Waste Land, butthis is not my point.My point here concerns the deterritori~izatio~effect which has separated words from thetr semioticreferents and money from economic goods.Let's consider the effect of dereferentializationwhich is the main thread of twentieth centurypoetic research (beginning with the symbolistdereglement des sens et des mots), and we'll ~ndsome similarities with the economic reconfiguranonthat occurred during the last three decades of thecentury, from the neoliberal deregulation to themonetarist abstract reregulation.Because of the technological revolution producedby information technology, the relationbetween time and value has been deregulated.Simultaneously, the relation between the sign andthe thing has blurred, as the ontological guaranteeof meaning based on the referential status of thesignifier has broken apart.26 I Tne Upris'ng: On Poetry anci FinanceTt1e European Collapse I 27

"Deregulation" is a word that was first proposedby the poet Arthur R.imbaud, and later recycled asa metaphor by neoliberal ideologues. Dbi!glementdes sens et des mots is the spiritual skyline of latemodern poetry. Words and senses wanted to escapethe frame of representation, of denotation, and ofnaturalistic reproduction. So the word and thesenses started to invent a new world of their own,rather than reflect or reproduce existing reality.Neoliberal ideology starts from the sameemphasis on deregulation and the cult of freedom.The similarity between poetical and financialderegulation is misleading, of course, but powerful.Neoliberal ideology does not intend deregulati-onas the free flight of social molecules out of anykind of rule, but it aims to liberate social activityfrom any regulation except the regulation ofmoney, and from the rule of competition, which isthe most ferocious.Here is my point. While liberating it from thebonds of political government, financial capitalismis subjecting social behavior to techno-linguisticgovernance.Governance is a keyword in the process of thefinancialization of the world.IPure functionality without meaning. Automationof thought and will.The embedding of abstract connections in therelation between living organisms. fThe technical subjection of choices to thelogic of concatenation. . . .IT he recombination of companble (companbllized)fragments (fractals). 11 T he inscription of a digital rhythm into thesocial body. 1In neoliberal parlance, deregulation meansliberation fro m the constraints generate~ ~y con-. w"111 but simultaneously subm1ss1on toSCIOUS ,techno-linguistic automatisms.Mathematical Ferocity and Symbolic InsolvencyLike the impressionist painters, the symbolist poetsalso said: "I do not want to show the thing, I wantto show the impression."The symbolists invite the reader to forget aboutthe referent. The symbolist word is not intended torepresent the thing, but to evoke a world from theimagination.The symbolist word is intended to act as anepiphany, an apparition from nothing. I s~y .therose, and the rose is there, not because 1t IS arepresented referent, but because it is the effect ~fan act of my voice. It is the effect of a pragmancdisplacement of expectations.In symbolist poetry meaning does not comefrom the representation of preexisting reality andfrom a correspondence with the referent, but28 I Tt1e Upns1ng: On Poetry and F1nanceTI1e European Co~ lacse I 29

from the evocative force of sound, and voice, and As the economy ceases to deal with the productionof things, and instead begins to evoke the worldrhythm.. T~e dereferentialization of language-the eman­ from the circulation of money, the hypertrophicCipation of the linguistic sign from the referentthatwas the operation of symbolism, and that was g Neoliberal ideology pretends to be a liberatingrowth of the debt becomes inevitable.t~e hallmark of poetic and artistic experimentation force that emancipates capital from state regu~ation,but it in fact submits production and socialWJ.th language in the twentieth century, has somethmgto do with a transformation in the relation life to the most ferocious regulation, the mathematizationof language.between the economy and monetary exchange thatoccured in the last part of the century.In 1 Systematic impoverishment is imposed o~ social?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. Theagreements, 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, whichIts value would henceforth be decided by an act of is leading the contemporary world towards barbarianismand social devastation.language, not by correspondence to a standard orto an economic referent.The premise of neoliberal dogmatism is theNixon's decision was the starting point of th reduction of social life to the mathematical implicationsof financial algorithms. What is good forfinancialization of the economy, based on th:emancipation of the financial dynamic from any conventionalstandard and from any economic reality. does not accept this identification and submission,finance must be good for society, and if societyWe 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 fored~sedthe referent. Forget about the referent, money Lucas Papademous of Greece and Mario Monti ofGoldman Sachs consultants, or bankers-likeU:zlf create the world-this is the arrogant declaration,of the omnipotence of economJ·cItaly-are imposed by financial power as unquestionableleaders of those countries which lagpower,which founded neoliberal monetarism.behind the necessary submission to the technical30 1 The Upns ng: On Pee try and F1nan:;eThe European Col!apse / 3 1

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Then, he says:The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and eve1ywhereThe ceremony of imzocence is drowned,·The best lnck all conviction, while the worstAre fit!! of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand,·Surely the Second Coming is at hand.W~ar revelation can we read in Years's poem,Wntten in I 9 I 9?The center cannot hold, and things have fallenapart, detached from their meaning. The revelationof the century is the devastating spiral ofabstraction and nihilism: abstraction of work fromactivity, abstraction of goods from usefulness,abstraction of time from sensuousness. Abstractionhas detached the epidermis of language from theflesh of the linguistic body.At the beginning of the second decade of rhenew century, as deregulated predatory capitalism isdestroying the future of the planer and of sociallife, poetry is going to play a new game: the gameof reactivating the social body.In the streets of Europe and in the wholeMe~iterranean basin, young people are revoltingagamsr the brutal exploitation of their rime andintelligence, and against the financial abstractionwhich is devastating social life. They are the precariousgeneration, obliged to accept exploitationand low wages, depleted of necessary resources fortheir education, promised a future of the endlessrepetition of a meaningless act of sacrifice on thealtar of debt. They are simultaneously the firstconnected generation, the first generation ofInternet natives. They are not only protestingagainst the gruesome effects of ne~liberal ~ule,they are also looking for a new meanmg of thmgs,activity, and love. . .The global deterritorialization of financial capitalismhas spread precariousness, psychic fragility, anddesolidarization. Therefore the current precariousinsurrection questions the rhythmic disturbanceprovoked by semio-capital, and tries to o~erc~meour existing inability to tune into a shared vibration.THE POWER OF IMAGINATION AND THEEUROPEAN COLLAPSEIn the crucial year 1933, Julien Benda wrote thefollowing words, in his book Discours a Ia nationeuropeenne (Address to the European nation):Europe will not be the fruit of an economic transformation:it will exist only when it will adopt acertain system of moral and aesthetic values.36 I The Uprising: On Poetry ancl F1nanceThe European Collapse / 37

I want to start from these words of Benda's becauseI want to talk about Europeaness: what Europe is,what Europe may be, what Europe cannot be. Istart from Julien Benda and from this well-knownspeech on the European nation, because what isremarkable in his text is his being conscious of thefact that Europe is not an existing entity, bur somethingthat has to be created by the imagination.What has Europe been over the past century?First of all, Europe has been the project of goingbeyond war, going beyond a cultural and philosophicalwar, not only the war between Franceand Germany, bur the war between romanticismand Enlightenment. So, at the beginning of thetwentieth century, the European project wasessentially a project of the will, spirit, and imagination,if you will. Then in the 1970s and '80s,the project of Europe became a project of overcomingthe opposition between East and West,between democracy and existing socialism, andso on-a project that existed in the imaginationof Europeans.What now? This is the question I'm trying toanswer. What is Europe now? If we listen to thespeeches of Angela Merkel, for instance, and tothose of all the other European politicians, bethey leftist or rightist, it makes no difference .. .Europe is a dogmatic project of reassuming andreinforcing neoliberal ideology, of a neoliberalI · that leads toregu anonthe impoverishment. .ofEuropeansocieties··to the slashmg of salanes, tothe postponement of retirement, and ftn~lly, tothe sad project of destroying, of devastanng, ofdismantling the general intellect.This is the central project of Europe nowadays: t he destruction of collective intelligence..Or, if you want to say it in a more pros~Ic w_ay,the destruction of the university, and the subjugauonf h to the narrow interests of profit and0 researceconomic competition.You know the situation of our most recentgeneration of students, for instance: we are teachingthings that may be good or bad, but are in the enduseless as far as their future is concerned, becausethey don't have a future. .Not having a future: this is already a kind ofrefrain, but I think we should start from this consideration,from this obvious knowledge-the idea ofa nonexistent future-as a condition of thought: ifwe start by dismantling the very possibility of .afuture, we are obliged to go beyond the dogmancreassertion of neoliberalism.Let us look at the landscape of philosophicaland political thought in Europe today, the s~calledEuropean high culture. The landscape ISrather gloomy.I remember what the philosophical discussionwas in the 1960s and '70s, in the wake of the38 I Ti1e Upnsing: On Pcetry and FinanceThe European Collapse I 39

Critical Theory that made possible the creation ofthe European entity in the sphere of dialecticalthought.I remember what French thought was in theI 970s and in the '80s, in the age of Gilles Deleuzeand Felix Guattari, Michel Foucault, JacquesDerrida, and Jean-Franc;:ois Lyotard. Their thoughtwas an attempt to imagine a possible future, but itwas also much more: it offered a cartography of thecoming future of the neoliberal, self-proclaimedderegulation.I think, for instance, of Foucault's wonderfulbook, The Birth of Biopolitics, which was probablythe most enlightening, imaginative forewarningof what was going to happen in the landscape ofthe world.And I also think of books like Anti-Oedipus andA Thousand Plateaus, and Baudrillard's SymbolicExchange and Death. These are the most importantbooks of the I 970s and '80s, and you can readthem all as cautionary imaginations of the comingneoliberal revolution. The work of these Frenchphilosophers of the I970s and '80s has formulateda cartography of the coming dystopia: a way ofthinking about the coming future as a dark age ofviolence and impoverishment.Then I look at the landscape of German philosophyin the I 970s and '80s: I consider the debatebetween ]i.irgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann,c ror mstan · ce · This ' too ' was an important anticipa-. fwhat Europe was going to become.non o · fThe good and, in a sense, benevolent 1dea oh H abermasian dialogic society, on the onet e f . .s1.d e: th e predicted benefits o commumcatton, .h deceptive illusion of communication based mt e d h al" ·d emocra Cy · And ' on the other si e, t e re 1sncconsideration of Luhmann, who describe~ afuture without alternatives, without poSSibleutopia · s , a future of governance. This . was a high­Iprofile discussion, which was focusmg the rea 'problematic horizon of the Euro_pean future.Governance, this word which has totallyinvaded the field of political nonrhought, wasfirst proposed and deconstructed by L~hman n i_nthe I970s and '80s. What is the meanmg of thisword, beyond the political manipulations of theruling class over the last few decades?As far as I can understand, the fact that governanceis a word which is much used and neverdefined today is a symptom of the total povertyof the political practice of our time.If we begin from the Luhmannian perspective,we can understand that governance is theautomation of thought, the automation of socialexistence. Governance is information withoutmeaning, a dominance of the unavoidable.In governance praxis, economic dogma istransformed into techno-linguistic automatism.40 I TI1e Upris;ng: On Poetry and FinanceTr.e Eu,opean Co'taose 1 41

T his is governance at its very end. In this senseLuhmann was kind of like a Philip K. Dick ofpolitical thought; he was like the Johnny Rottenof political imagination. He was speaking abourno future, the coming no future, which is thehere and now.Starting from this sense of no future that thepo ~i tica l thought of the 1970s and '80s had proclaimedand mapped in advance, we can understandwhat is happening today in the presentEuropean nightmare.. ~~ ose thinkers were able to imagine and tocnticize, but now? Now, cynicism has invadedthe sphere of thought, no less than the sphere ofpolitics.Look at the sadness of French cynicalthought, think of what has become of the inrellecruallandscape of Paris: a monument to sadnessa monument to cynicism. Paris today is a c i ~wh ~ re t ~ o ught has been transformed into journalism, Into the continuous repetition of thiski nd of illusion of European arrogance w hichhas ~ aved the way to the fi nancial collapse, toth ~ 111finite war that George W Bush has proclai,med,~ nd that Tony Blair, Nicolas Sarkozy,Jose Man a Aznar, and Silvio Berlusconi havesupported.T he cynical nonthinkers who inhabit theParisian scene of today, once called les nouveauxphilosophes, have paved t~e way to dogmatis~,violence, racism, impovenshment, and financialdictatorship.A light of possible intelligence and opennessseems to come nor from philosophy, bur from art.I am not actually sure of what I am talkingabout when I say the word art. You aren'teither-nobody is exactly.Yet it seems that in a recent poll, twen ty-fourto cwenry-five percent of young German peopleinterviewed by journalists answered the question"what do you want to do when you're an adult"by stating that they wanted to be artists. W hatare they picturing? What do they think being anartist means, exactly? Are they thinking aboutthe rich possibilities that the art market offers?Well, maybe, but I don't think so. I think thatthey are saying that they want to be artistsbecause they feel that being an artist means toescape a future of sadness, to escape a future ofprecariousness as sadness. They are thinking, well,precariousness and sadness can become somethingdifferent, something not so sad, not soprecarious, if they with draw their faith, if theywithdraw from any expectations a capitalistfuture can offer. I don't want to expect anythingfrom the future, so I start my future as an artist.The European Col!apse I 43

PURGATORY"The German worker does not want to pay theGreek fisherman's bills." The fanatics of economicfundamentalism are pitting workers against workersand leading Europe to the brink of civil war. Intheir relentless efforts to transfer money andresources from society to the financial classes,neoliberal ideologues have never hesitated to usemanipulation and deception: their half-truthsand fictions are transformed by the global mediainto "common knowledge." Here are a few suchconceptual manipulations which are helpingneoliberalism destroy European society:First manipulation: By lowering taxes on the rich,you will increase employment.Why should this be the case? Such logic isbeyond comprehension. On the contrary: theowners of capital invest only so long as their profitsare perceived to be guaranteed. Any influence ofstate taxation on investment plans is at bestinconsequential, and more often than not irrelevant.The state should thus progressively increasetaxation on the rich in order to further investresources and create jobs. The conceptual foundationof Reaganomics, the so-called Laffer curve(progressive lowering of taxes on the affluent), isnothing more than abstract rubbish which hasbeen transformed into a legislative commandmentwielded by both the left and right wings for thelast thirty years. . .Second manipulation: Postponmg the rettrementage increases youth employment.An absurd assessment. If an elderly workerreures, . I og ically a new job will be available k for . ayounger Worker · If ' however, an elderly . wor er ISroKe c d to work an additional five, SIX,. or sevenyears b ey Ond what was stipulated . in his contract,I . all this J'ob will not be available for a youngerogic y f h dd' · alwor k er throughout the entirety o t e a . mon .duration. A simple syllogism. Yet economiC policyover the last thirty years, both on the left and. rightwmgs, . favors this mysterious and contradictorypnnCip . . le ,·n which elderly workers must be forcedto work longer in order to increase employmentopportunities for the young. The result being thatcapitalists, instead of paying a pension to theelderly and a salary to young workers, pay a si.n.glesalary to averaged workers while blackm:ulmgunemployed youths into accepting any formwhatsoever of precarious, underpaid labor.Third manipulation: Privatization and marketcompetition are the best guarantees of quality forschools and public services.Over thirty years of rampant privatization hasamply demonstrated that the private sectorinherently facilitates drastic reductions in quality.This is because the private sector is primarily44 I The Upnsing: On Poetry and FinanceT11e European Collapse I 45

interested in increasing profits, not promoting thepublic good. And when reduction in quality leadsto outright malfunction, as often happens, theresulting losses for prerequisite services aresocialized while profits remain private.Fourth manipulation: Workers are paid too mud~we have been living above and beyond our means. Wemust be paid less in order to become more competitive.The preceding decades have witnessed a drasticcut in actual wages, while profits have skyrocketed.In successfully leveraging the threat of job transferto newly industrialized countries where the cost ofwork hovers at near-slavery levels and conditions,western workers' salaries have been severelyreduced along with the capitalist's productioncosts. Debt has been favored in any and all formsin order to entice people to purchase otherwiseunsellable merchandise and goods. All of this hasinduced a cultural and political process of pushingforms of social agency into a condition of dependency(debt is an agent within the unconsciousenabling guilt and a consequent drive for atonement),and at the same time has rendered theentire societal system vulnerable and fragile, exposingit to repeated collapse as witnessed in the frequenteconomic bubble "boom and crash" cycles.Fifth manipulation: Inflation is our preeminentdanger, and the Central European Bank has only onegoal, to oppose inflation at any cost.What is inflation? Inflation is either a reductionin the value of money, or an increase in the price ofcommodities. Inflation may indeed be dangerousfor a society, but balancing mechanisms may be putinto place (such as the sliding-scale mechanismused in Italy until 1984, when it was cancelledunder yet another glorious neoliberal "reform").The true danger for social life is deflation, whichleads to recession and the reduction of the socialmachine's productive potential. Owners of capital,rather than seeing the value of their moneydiminish, prefer provoking recession and widespreadsocial misery. The European bank preferscreating recession, misery, unemployment, poverty,barbarianism, and violence, rather than abdicatingthe restrictive rules of the Maastricht Treaty, whichprevent it from easily printing money, giving societyspace to breathe, and redistributing wealth. In orderto manufacture an artificial fear of inflation, theghost of Germany's inflation cycle of the 1920s{justly feared by the Germans) is invoked, as ifinflation itself were the cause of Nazism, and notthe manner in which inflation was managed byGerman and international capitalists of the time.Everything is crumbling-it's crystal clear. Themeasures that the financial class are forcing onEuropean countries are the exact opposite of"solutions":they can only multiply the scale and effectsof the disaster. It's called a financial "rescue," but it's46 I The Uprising: On Poetry and FinanceThe European Collapse I 4 7

a strange form of rescue, designed to slash salaries(thereby reducing future demand), cut spending onsocial infrastructure, destroy public schools, andcontract present and future productive capacity,thereby inducing an immediate recession. The wayevents have unfolded in Greece perfectly demonstratesthese facts: the European financial rescue hasdestroyed its productive capacity, privatized itspublic structures, and demoralized its population.Greece's Gross Domestic Product has dropped byseven percent in one year alone, with no signs ofrecovery. Rescue loans are administered at suchhigh rates of interest that Greece can only sinkfurther into debt and endure an increasing sense ofguilt, misery, and hatred toward Europe. And nowthe Greek "rescue" is being applied to Portugal,Spain, Ireland, and Italy. Its only effect will be amassive transfer of resources and wealth from thesecountries to the ruling financial class. Austerity willnot reduce deficits. On the contrary, it will lead todeflation, as well as the reduction of productionand wealth, provoking further debt and consequentborrowing to the point where the European castlewill be forced to crumble.Resistance movements must be prepared.Revolt is winding its way through European cities,having taken concrete shape in Rome, Athens, andLondon on December 14, 201 0; and later in theacampada protests of May and June in Spain, andthe four nights of rage in the suburbs of England.Insurrection will expand and proliferate in theupcoming months, yet it will not be a lightheartedunderraking, nor will it be a linear process of socialemancipation.Society has been broken up, rendered fragileand fragmented by thirty years of perpetual precarization,uncontrolled and rampant competition,and psychic poisoning produced and controlled bythe likes of Rupert Murdoch, Silvio Berlusconi,and their criminal media empires.There will be little cheer in the coming insurrection,which will often be marked by racismand self-defeating violence. This is the unfortunateeffect of the ·long process of desolidarizationwhich neoliberalism and the criminal politicalleft have subjected society to for decades throughtheir incessant proliferation and fragmentationof work.In the upcoming years we can expect the diffusionof widespread ethnic civil war, as alreadywitnessed in the dust of the English revolt and theoutbursts of violence in Birmingham. No one willbe able to stop or guide the insurrection, whichwill function as a chaotic reactivation of the energiesof the body of the socius, which has for toolong been flattened, fragmented, and lobotomized.The task of resistance movements will not be toprovoke, but rather to create (coextensively with48 I Tl~e Up'iS•n;?: On Pootr,• and Frnan-::eTI•e European Coii3JCSe I 49

the insurrection) autonomous structures forknowledge, existence, survival, psychotherapy, andgiving life meaning and autonomy. This will be along and potentially traumatic process.Europe must overcome Maasrrichr in order robe reinvented. Debt must be disowned just as mustbe the measures which cause and feed ir. The fallof Maastricht is perilous, yet unavoidable, as it willinevitably open the doors to nationalism andviolence. Yet Europe, as it stands, can no longer bedefended. Resistance movements must rearriculateEuropean discourse through social solidarity,egalitarianism, rhe reduction of working rime,the expropriation of capital conglomerates, thecancellation of debt, and rhe abolition of borderstoward the construction of a postterrirorial politics.Europe must be pushed beyond Maastricht andthe Schengen Agreement and embrace a futureform of the international.THE RIGHT TO INSOLVENCY AND THE DISENTANGLE­MENT OF THE POTENCY OF THE GENERAL INTELLECTA Movement for the Reactivation of the Social BodyThe European leading class seems incapable ofthinking in terms of the future. T hey are panickingand, frightened by their own impotence, they aretrying to reaffirm and reinforce measures that havealready failed.The European collapse is exposing the agony ofcapitalism. The flexibility of the system is over, nomargins are left. If society is to pay the debt of thebanks, demand has to be reduced, and if demandis reduced, growth will not follow.Nowadays, it's difficult to see a consistentproject in the frantic action of the leading class."No future" culture has taken hold of the capitalistbrain, and the origin of this capitalist nihilism isto be found in the effect of deterritorializarionrhar is inherent ro global financial capitalism.The relation between capital and society isdererritorialized, as economic power is no longerbased on the property of physical things. Thebourgeoisie is dead, and the new financial classhas a virtual existence: fragmented, dispersed,impersonal.The bourgeoisie, which was once in control ofthe economic scene of modern Europe, was astrongly territorialized class, linked to materialassets; it could nor survive without relationships toterritory and community. The financial classwhich has taken the reins of the European politicalmachine has no attachment either to territory or tomaterial production, because its power and wealthare founded on the total abstraction of digitalfinance. This digital-financial hyperabstraction is50 I The Upns ng: On Pceuy and FinanceTt1e European Collapse I 51

-liquidating the living body of the planet and thesocial body of the workers' community.Can it last? The European directorate thatemerged after the Greek crisis, in the absence ofany consultation of public opinion, has affirmedits own monopoly over decisions regarding theeconomies of the different countries approachingdefault in 2011. It effectively divested parliamentsof authority and replaced EU democracy with abusiness executive headed by the large banks. Canthe ECB-IMF-EU directorate impose a system ofautomatisms that secures EU members' compliancewith the process of public-sector wage reduction,layoffs of a third of all teachers, and so on? Thisorder of things can not last indefinitely, as the finalcollapse of the Union is the point of arrival of thespiral of debt-deflation-recession-debt that is alreadyexposed in the Greek agony.Society was slow in reacting, as collective intelligencehas been deprived of its social body, andthe social body has been completely subjugatedand depressed. Then, at the end of 2010, a waveof protests and riots exploded in the schools anduniversities, and now that wave is mountingeverywhere. But protests, demonstrations, andriots seem unable to force a change in the politicsof the Union. Let's try to understand why, and let'salso try to look for a new methodology of actionand a new political strategy for the movement.The protest movement has proliferated duringthe last year. From London to Rome, from Athensto New York, not to mention the North Africanprecarious workers who have been part of therecent upheavals that are changing (for better orworse) the Arab world, this movement is targetingthe financial powers and trying to oppose theeffects of the financial assault on society. Theproblem is that peaceful demonstrations androtests have not been able to change the agenda~f the European Central Bank, as the nationalarliaments of the European countries are hostages~f the Maastricht rules, which are financial automatismsworking as the material constitution ofthe Union . Peaceful demonstrations are effective inthe frame of democracy, but democracy is overnow that techno-financial automatisms have takenthe place of political decisions.Violence is erupting here and there. The fournights of rage in the English suburbs and theviolent riots of Rome and Athens have shown thatit's possible for social protest to become aggressive.But violence, too, is unfit to change the course ofthings. Burning a bank is totally useless, as financialpower is not in the physical buildings, but inthe abstract connections between numbers, algorithms,and information. Therefore, if we want todiscover forms of action which may be able toconfront the present form of power, we have to52 I n,e Upris,ng: On Poetry and F1nancE:Tile European Col!aps_, I 53

start from the understanding that cognitivelabor is the main productive force creating thetechno-linguistic automatisms which enablefinancial speculation. Following the example ofWikileaks, we must organize a long-lasting processof dismantling and rewriting the techno-linguisticautomatons enslaving all of us.Social subjectivity seems weak and fragmentedagainst the backdrop of the financial assault.Thirty years of the precarization of labor andcompetition have jeopardized the very fabric ofsocial solidarity, and workers' psychic ability toshare time, goods, and breath made fragile. Thevirrualization of social communication has erodedthe empathy between human bodies.The problem of solidarity has always been crucialin every process of struggle and social change.Autonomy is based on the ability to share dailylife and to recognize that what is good for me isgood for you, and that what is bad for you is badfor me. Solidarity is difficult to build now thatlabor has been turned into a sprawl of recombinanttime-cells, and now that the process of subjectivationhas consequently become fragmentary, disempathetic,and frail.Solidarity has nothing to do with altruistic selfdenial.In materialistic terms, solidarity is notabout you, it's about me. Like love, solidarity is notabout altruism: it is about the pleasure of sharingthe breath and space of the other. Love is the abilityto enjoy myself thanks to your presence, to youreyes. This is solidarity. Because solidarity is basedon the territorial proximity of social bodies, youcannot build solidarity between fragments of time.I don't think that the English riots and theItalian revolts and the Spanish acampada should beseen as consequential revolutionary forms, becausethey are unable to really strike at the heart ofpower. They have to be understood as forms of thepsycho-affective reactivation of the social body;they have to be seen as attempts to activate a livingrelation between the social body and the generalintellect. Only when the general intellect is able toreconnect with the social body will we be able tostart a process of real autonomization from the gripof financial capitalism.The Right to InsolvencyA new concept is emerging from the fog of thepresent situation: the right to insolvency. We're notgoing to pay the debt.The European countries have been obliged toaccept the blackmail of the debt, but people arerejecting the notion that we should have to pay fora debt that we have not taken.Anthropologist David Graeber, in his bookDebt: The First 5,000 Yem:r (2011), and philosopher54 I Tt1e Upnsng: On Pcstry and Fna"lceThe European Col'apse I 55

Maurizio Lazzara to, in The Making of the IndebtedMan (201 2), have inaugurated an interestingreflection on the cultural origin of the notion ofdebt, and the psychic implications of the sense ofguilt that this notion carries.Additionally, in his essay "Recurring Dreams­The Red H eart of Fascism," the young Anglo­Italian thinker Federico Campagna pinpoints theanalogy berween the post-Versailles Congress yearsand the debt-obsessed present.Last rime, it rook him decades to be born. First itwas the war, and then, once it was over, it wasdebt, and all the ries that came with it. It was therime of industrialization, the rime of modernity,and everything came in a mass scale. Massimpoverishment, mass unemployment, hyperinflation,hyper-populism. Nations were crackingunder the weight of what marxisrs used to call"contradictions," while capitalists were clingingto the brim of their top-hats, all waiting for thesky to fall to earth. And when it fell, they threwthemselves down after it, in the dozens, downfrom their skyscrapers and their office blocks.The air became electric, squares filled up, treesturned into banners and batons. It was the interwarperiod, and in rhe depth of the social body,Nazism was still hidden, liquid and growing,quiet like a foetus.T his time, everything is happening almostexactly the same way as las t time, just slightly outof-sync,as happens with recurring dreams. Onceagain, the balance of power in the world is shifting.The old empire is sinking, melancholically, andnew powers are rushing in the race to the top. Justlike before, their athletic screams are the powerfulones of modernity. Growth! Growth! Growth!Their armies are powerful, their teeth shiny, theirhopes murderous and pure. Old powers look atthem in fear, listening to their incomprehensiblelanguages like old people listen ro young people'smusic. (Campagna, 2011)T he burden of debt is haunting the Europeanimagination of the future, and the U nion, whichused to represent a promise of prosperity andpeace, is turning into a blackmail and a threat.In response, the movement has launched theslogan: Wei·e not going to pay the debt. T hese wordsare deceiving at the moment, as in actuality we arealready paying for the debt: the educational systemhas already been deflnanced and privatized, jobs havebeen elimated, and so on. But these words are meantto change the social perception of the debt, creating aconsciousness of its arbitrariness and moral illegitimacy.T he right to insolvency is emerging as a newkey phrase and concept loaded with philosophicalimplications. The concept of insolvency implies56 I TI1e Up1is ng: On Poetry and Finan::eThe European Collapse I 57

-not only a refusal to pay the financial debt, buralso, in a more subtle way, a refusal to submit theliving potency of social forces to the formal dominationof the economic code.The reclamation of the right to insolvency impliesa radical questioning of the relation between thecapitalist form (Gestalt) and the concrete productivepotency of social forces, particularly the potency ofthe general intellect. The capitalist form is not only aset of economic rules and functions, it is also theinternalization of a certain set of limitations, ofpsychic automatism, of rules for compliance.Try to imagine for a second that the wholefinancial semiotization of European life disappears;try to imagine that all of a sudden we stop organizingdaily life in terms of money and debt.Nothing would change in the concrete, usefulpotentiality of society, in the contents of ourknowledge, in our skills and ability to produce.We should imagine (and consequently organize)the disentanglement of the living potentiality ofthe general intellect from the capitalist Gestaltintended,first and foremost, as a psychic automatismgoverning daily life.Insolvency means disclaiming the economiccode of capitalism as a transliteration of real life, asa semiotization of social potency and richness.The concrete, useful productive ability of thesocial body is forced to accept impoverishment inexchange for nothing. The concrete force of productivelabor is submitted to the unproductive,and actually destructive, task of refinancing thefailed financial system.If we may paradoxically cancel every mark ofthis financial semiotization, nothing would changein the social machinery, nothing in our intellectualability to conceive and perform.Communism does not need to be called outfrom the womb of the future; it is here, in our being,in the immanent life of common knowledge.But the present situation is paradoxicalsimultaneouslyexciting and despairing. Capitalismhas never been so close to its final collapse, butsocial solidarity has never been so far from ourdaily experience. We must start from this paradoxin order to build a postpolitical and postrevolutionaryprocess of disentangling the possible fromthe existent.EXHAUSTION: A SENILE UTOPIA FOR THEEUROPEAN INSURRECTIONFinancial DictatorshipIntellectuals like Jiirgen Habermas and JacquesDerrida, among many others, have in the paststressed the refrain: "We need to create institutions58 / TI1e Upnsing: On Poetl)l and F1nanceThe European Collapse I 59

for unified political decision at the level of theEuropean Union."In the aftermath of the Greek crisis, it seemsthat the Europhile intellectuals have gotten whatthey have been asking for. The Euro entity hasbeen subjected to an act of political decision andto a sort of political directorate which is enforcingnarrow obedience. Unfortunately, however, politicshas taken this lead only in order to make theassessment that finance alone represents the trueleadership of the Union.A political enforcement of finance's dominationover European society has been the outcome so farof this early stage of the European tragedy.Welfare-state institutions have been underattack for thirty years. Full employment, laborrights, social security, retirement, public school,public transportation-all have been reduced,worsened, or destroyed. After thirty years ofneoliberal zeal, a collapse has occurred.What will happen next? The leading class answersroughly: more of the same. Further reduction ofsalaries for public workers, further postponementof the retirement age. No respect for society's needsor for the rights of workers.Thatcher said thirty years ago that there is nosuch thing as society. Today, that echoes like a selffulfillingprophecy. Society is in fact dissolving,reducing public space to a jungle wherein everyoneis fighting against one another. After the Greekcrisis, the dogma of monetarism has been stronglyreinforced, as if more poison could act as an antidote.Reducing demand will lead to recession, andthe only outcome will be a further concentrationof capital in the hands of the financial class, andthe further impoverishment of labor.After the Greek financial crisis, emergencyrule was declared. A self-proclaimed directorate,Merkel-Sarkozy-Trichet, imposed a deflationarypolicy, and is now going to impose it on thedifferent national governments of Europe. Inorder to save the financial system, this self-proclaimeddirectorate is diverting resources fromsociety to the banks. And in order to reaffirmthe failed philosophy of neoliberalism, socialspending is cut, salaries are lowered, retirementtime is postponed, and young people's work ismade precarious.Those who will not bend to the Great Necessity(Competition and Growth) will be out of thegame. Those who want to stay in the game willhave to accept any punishment, any renunciation,any suffering that the Great Necessity willdemand. Who said that we absolutely must be partof the game?The effect of the collapse of neoliberal politics hasso far been its own confirmation and consolidation.After the collapse of the American financial system,60 I Ths Upns,ng: On Poetry ar:d Ftnanca

everybody was expecting abandonment or at leastattenuation of capital concentration, and a process ofrevenue redistribution seemed possible in order toincrease demand. Nothing like this has happened. AKeynesian approach has not even been explored, andPaul Krugman has been left alone to repeat veryreasonable things that nobody wants to hear.Thanks to the crisis, American society has beenrobbed for the benefit of big finance, and nowEurope is following the same dynamic, with a sortof mathematical ferocity.Is there any chance of stopping this insane race?A social explosion is possible, because the conditionsof daily life will soon become unbearable.But labor precarity and the decomposition ofsocial solidarity may open the way to a frighteningoutcome: ethnic civil war on a continental scaleand the dismantling of the Union, which wouldunleash the worst passions of the nations.In Paris, London, Barcelona, and Rome, massivedemonstrations have erupted in protest againstthe restrictive measures, but this movement is notgoing to stop the catastrophic freight train ofaggression bearing down on social life, because theEuropean Union is not a democracy but rather afinancial dictatorship whose politics is subjected tounquestionable decisions.Peaceful demonstrations will not be able tochange the course of things, and predictable violentexplosions will be exploited by the repressive forceof the state. A deep change in social perception andlifestyle will occur, and a growing portion of societywill withdraw from the economic field, and stoppartaking in the game of work and consumption.These people will abandon the script of individualconsumption; create new, enhanced forms ofcohabitation; establish village economies in metropolises;withdraw from the field of the marketeconomy; and create community currencies.Unless they are seized by avarice-a psychoticobsession-all that human beings want is a pleasant,possibly long life, and to consume only what isnecessary to stay fit and make love. "Civilization"is the pompous name we have given to everypolitical and moral value that has made the pursuitof such a lifestyle possible.The financial dogma states the following: ifwe want to keep partici paring in the game playedin banks and stock markets, we must forfeit apleasant, quiet life. We must forfeit civilization.But why should we accept this exchange? Europe'swealth is not based on the stability of the euro oninternational markets, or on managers' ability tokeep count of their profits. Europe is wealthybecause it has millions of intellectuals, scientists,technicians, doctors, and poets, and millions ofworkers who have for centuries developed technicalknowledge. Europe is wealthy because it has62 I n-,e Upris:ng: On Poeiry ar.o F•ranc~The European Collapse I 63

historically managed to valorize competence, notjust competition, and to welcome and integratecultures from afar. It is also wealthy, it must besaid, because for four centuries it has ferociouslyexploited the physical and human resources ofother continents.We must forfeit something, but what exactly?Certainly, we must let go of the hyperconsumptionimposed on us by large corporationsbutnot by the traditions of humanism, theEnlightenment, and socialism, not by the ideals offreedom, civil rights, and welfare. And I say thisnot because I believe we should be attached toprinciples of the past, but because these principalsmake it possible to live decently.The prospect open to us is not a revolution.The concept of revolution no longer correspondsto anything, because it entails an exaggeratednotion of political will over the complexity ofcontemporary society. Our prospect is a paradigmaticshift: to a new paradigm that is not centeredon product growth, profit, and accumulation, buton the full, unfolding of the power of collectiveintelligence.Aesthetics of EuropeThe aesthetics of the European Union are frigidby definition.The European Union was born in the aftermathof the Second World War, with the goal offorgetting our old nationalist and ideological passions.Here lies its progressive and pragmaticnature. Forgetting romanticism is the categoricalimperative of the Union.Lately, however, this foundational, antimythologicalmyth of the Union seems blurred, confused,and forgotten because its apathetic perception ofbeing together was only possible in a condition ofprosperity. As long as the EU was able to guaranteea growing level of consumption, as long as themonetarist rule favored economic growth, the EUcould exist. What now?The European Union is a fiction of democracyactually governed by an autocratic organism, theEuropean Central Banlc While the Federal Reservein the US is officially dedicated to the stability ofprices and full employment, the ECB charterdeclares only one goal: fighting inflation. Today thisgoal is irrational, as deflation is the prevailing trend.Citizens can do nothing in order to influencethe politics of the ECB, as the Bank does notrespond to political authority. This is whyEuropean citizens have been conscious of thevacuity of European elections. In the future theymay come to view the Union as their enemy.Social movements should try to change thelandscape, and imagine the mythology for cultural64 I Tne Ur:;nsn;r On Poetry ancl Fir\3PceTile Eu1opean Collapse I 65

transition. We should focus on a foundationalmyth of European history: the myth of energy.Modern culture and political imagination haveemphasized the virtues of youth--of young passion,and of energy, aggressiveness, and growth.Capitalism is based on the exploitation of physicalenergy, and semio-capitalism has subjugated thenervous energy of society to the point of collapse.The notion of exhaustion has always beenanathema for the discourse of Modernity:Romantik Sturm und Drang, the Faustian drivetoward immortality, an endless thirst for economicgrowth, and profits.Organic limits have been denied, forgotten.The organic body of the Earth, and the entropyinherent to human life, has been despised, concealed,and segregated.The romantic cult of youth is the culturalsource of nationalism. During the Romantic era,Europe was an emerging civilization which wassecuring political hegemony by conquering thegreat Eastern civilizations. We should not forgetthat at the end of the eighteenth century, Indiaand China were responsible for producing morethan seventy percent of the total global product ofthe world. Their decline cannot be separated fromEurope's ascent to domination.In the colonial age, nationalism was the culturalcondition of colonial Empires like Britain andFrance, but around the turn of the twentiethcentury, nationalism resurfaced in a responsiveform and began to express the self-affirmation ofyoung countries (Italy, Japa.n, and ~ermany),while the old empires (Russ1a, Austna and theOttomans) were heading toward collapse.Nationalism can also take a self-affirmativeform for the young generation at the cultural andeconomic level, as is evident in Italian futurism.Old-fashioned styles are devalued, old people andwomen despised because of their weakness. Fascismdepicts itself as the young age of the nations.In late modernity, the rhetoric of the young andthe devaluation of the old becomes an essentialfeature of advertising. Contrary to fascist discourse,late-modern advertising does not abuse old age. Itdenies it, claiming that every old person can be youngif they will only rake part in the consumerist feast.The fascism that triumphed in Italy after 1922can be seen as an ene1golatreia (energy worship) ofrhe young.Berlusconi's style is restaging arrogance, contemptfor democratic rules, and machoism, burrhe actors of the present comedy are old men whoseek help from bio-rechniques, psycho-chemistry,and pharmacology. Denial of age and of time isthe ultimate delirium of the global class, asNorman Spinrad shows in his 1969 novel, Bugjack Barron.66 I Tile Uprising: On Poetry and FinanceThe Eurooean Collapse I 67

Like the heroic mythology of fascist nationalism(and a l s~ the mythology of advertising),Berlusconi s subculture is based on a delirium ofpower. The former was based on the youthfulvirtues of strength, energy, and pride; the latter is~ased on the mature virtues of technique, deception,and finance. The nemesis that followed theyouthful violence of fascism was the SecondWorld War and its unthinkable surfeit of destructionand death. What nemesis will be broughtabout by the present energolatreia of the old?The destiny of Europe will play out in thebiopolitical sphere, at the border between consumerism,techno-sanitarian youth-styled aggressivity,and the possible collective consciousness of thelimits of the biological (sensitive) organism.Exhaustion has no place in Western culture,and this is a problem right now, because exhaustionneeds to be understood and accepted as a newparadigm for social life. Only the cultural andpsychic elaboration of exhaustion will open thedoor to a new conception and perception ofwealth and happiness.T he coming European insurrection will notbe an insurrection of energy, but an insurrectionof slowness, withdrawal, and exhaustion. It willbe the autonomization of the collective bodyand soul from the exploitation of speed andcompetition.In the next decade, Europe will make a decisivechoice. Europe now faces a dilemma between twohypotheses.One path would be to accept a deal that redistributeswealth and resources; that opens Europe'sborders to the crowds coming from Africa andAsia; that implies a reduction in the Western,comsumptive lifestyle, heading instead toward anongrowth of production and consumption. Thisoption would not imply the idea of sacrifice andrenunciation, but rather the enjoyment of timewithout any expectation of competitive acquisitionand accumulation.The other would be an intensification of theinterethnic civil war whose first signs are alreadyvisible. The majority of European people are desperatelydefending the privilege accumulated duringrhe centuries of colonialism, but this privilege hasbeen deteriorating since the fall of colonialistempires in the past century, and is now fallingapart in the course of the global recession.In the game of economic competition, Europecannot win. H ow long will it take to reduce atypical European salary to the level of an Indian,Chinese, or Vietnamese worker? It's going to takeroo much time and too much violence and blood.This is why financial markets distrust the euro: ifthe standard is capital gain, profit, and competition,then Europe's decline is guaranteed.68 I Tl~e Uoris.r~g· On Pcetry and Frnan::eThe European Collapse I 69

The question that remains is: who says thateconomic competition is the only standard andpolitical criterion of choice? Bateson would definethe European malaise in terms of a double-bind,or contradictory injunction. Neoliberal dogma isdictating European society to compete, and issimultaneously dictating the destruction of thestructures constituting the cultural and productivecondition of its wealth. The neoliberal idea ofwealth is advancing social misery more and more.Gregory Bateson suggests that double-binds haveparadoxical outcomes. And the paradoxicalsolution for Europe could be to not fear decline.Decline (reverse growth) implies a divestment fromthe frenzy of competition: this is the paradoxicalpath that may bring us out of neoliberalism'sdouble-bind.2LANGUAGE, ECONOMY, AND THE BODYTHE FUTURE AFTER THE END OF THE ECONOMYEconomic Science Is Not a ScienceAt the close of the summer of 2011, the economicnewspapers were talking more and more of a "doubledip." Economists predict there will be anotherrecession before there can be a recovery.I think they are wrong. There ·will be a recession-onthat I agree-but there will never again beany recovery, if recovery means a renewal of growth.If you say this in public, you are regarded as atraitor, a wrecker, a doomsayer, and economistsscorn you as a villain. But economists are not wisepeople. They should not even be considered scientists.They are much more similar to priests,denouncing society's bad behaviors, asking you torepent for your debts, threatening inflation andmisery for your sins, and worshipping the dogmasof growth and competition.70 I The Upns.ng: On Pcetry and Frnance71

It is difficult to believe that something like"economic science" really exists. What is a science?W ithout embarking on epistemological discussions,I would simply say that science is a form ofknowledge which is free of dogma, which is able toextrapolate general laws from the observation ofempirical phenomena (and consequently able topredict something about what will happen next),and finally which is able to understand thosekinds of changes that Thomas Kuhn has labeledparadigm shifts.As far as I know, the discourse named "economics"does not correspond to this schema.First of all, economists are beset with dogmaticnotions like growth, competition, and gross nationalproduct, and cl1ey determine that social reality is outof order when it is not matching these criteria.Second, economists are totally unable to inferlaws from the observation of reality, as they preferinstead that reality harmonize with their pretendedlaws. As a consequence, they are totally unable topredict anything, as experience has shown over thelast three or four years.Finally, economists cannot understand what ishappening when the social paradigm is changing,and strongly refuse to redefine their conceptualframework because they pretend that reality has tobe changed in order for it to correspond to theiroutdated criteria.T he faculty and students of economics andbusiness schools do not teach and learn subjectslike physics or chemistry or astronomy, disciplinesthat deserve the title of scientific knowledge, andwhich each conceptualize a specific field of reality.Economics faculty and students rather teach andstudy a technology, a set of tools, of procedures, ofpragmatic protocols that are intended to forcesocial reality into practical purposes: profits, accumulation,power. Economic reality does not exist,it is the result of a process of technical modeling,submission, and exploitation.The theoretical discourse that supports theeconomic technology can be defined as ideology,in the sense proposed by Marx, who was not aneconomist, but a critic of political economy.Ideology is in fact a theoretical technologyaimed at supporting special political and socialgoals. And economics ideology, like all technologies,is not self-reflexive, and therefore is unable todevelop a theoretical self-appreciation and toreframe itself in relation to a paradigm shift.Financial Deterritorialization and Labor PrecariryThe development of productive forces, the creationof the global network of cognitive labor that in"Fragment on Machines" ( Grundrisse) Marx named"general intellect," has provoked an enormousLanguage. Economy. and the Body I 73

Tincrease in the productive potency of labor. Thispotency can no longer be semiotized, organized, andcontained by the social form of capitalism.Capitalism is no longer able to semiotize and toorganize the social potency of cognitive productivity,because value can no longer be defined in terms ofthe average necessary time of labor, and thereforethe old fo rms of private property and salary are nolonger able to semiotize and organize the deterritorializedexistence of capital and social labor.Economists are totally dazzled by this transformation,as economic knowledge has always beenstructured according to the paradigm of bourgeoiscapitalism: linear accumulation, measurability ofvalue, and private appropriation of surplus value. T heshift from the industrial form of production to thesemiotic form of production, the shift from physicallabor to cognitive labor, has projected capitalism outof itself, out of its ideological self-consciousness.The bourgeoisie, which was a territorialized class(the class of the bourg, of the city), was able to managephysical property, as well as a measurable relationbetween time and value. The utter financializationof capital marks the end of the old bourgeoisie, andopens the door to the deterritorialized and rhizomaticproliferation of economic power relations.Now the old bourgeoisie has no power anymore,having been replaced by a proliferating virtual class(a deterritorialized and pulverized social dust,rather than a territorialized group of people) that isusually referred to as "financial markets."Labor is undergoing a parallel process of pulverizationand deterritorialization, that is calledprecarity (or the precariousness of labor). Precarizationis not only the loss of a regular job and asalary, bur it is also the effect of fragmentation andpulverization of work, the fracture in the relationshipbetween worker and territory. The cognitiveworker, in fact, does not need to be linked to aplace, and his or her activity can be diffusedthroughout a nonphysical territory.The old economic categories (salary, privateproperty, and linear growth) no longer make sensein this new situation. The productivity of thegeneral intellect, in terms of use value (of productionof useful semiotic goods), is virtually unlimited. Sohow can semiotic labor be valued, when its productsare immaterial? H ow can the relationship betweenwork and salary be determined? How can wemeasure value in terms of time, if the productivityof cognitive work (creative, affective, linguistic)cannot be quantified and standardized?The End of GrowthThe notion of growth is crucial in the conceptualframework of the economic technology. If socialproduction does not comply with the economic7 4 I Ti1e Uprising: On Poetry and F1nanceLanguage. Eccnamy. and the BO:ii I 75

expectations of growth, economists decree thatsociety is sick and shivering, and they name rhedisease "recession." This diagnosis has nothing todo with the needs of the population, because itdoes nor refer to the use-value of things and ofsemiotic goods, bur to abstract capitalist accumulation,which is accumulation of exchange value.Growth, in the economic sense, is not about theincrease of social happiness and satisfaction of thebasic needs of people, bur about the expansion offinancial profits and the expansion of the globalvolume of exchange value. Gross national product,the main indicator of growth, is nor a measure ofsocial welfare and pleasure, bur a monetary measure.Social happiness or unhappiness does notgenerally depend on the amount of money circulatingin the economy, bur rather depends on thedistribution of wealth, and on the balance ofcultural expectations and the availability of physicaland semiotic goods.Growth is a cultural concept, more than it is anevaluative economic criterion of social health andwell being. It is linked to the modern conceptionof the future as infinite expansion.For many reasons, infinite expansion hasbecome an impossible task for the social body.Since the Club of Rome published the book TheLimits to Growth in 1972, we have been informedthat the physical resources of the planet are notboundless, and social production has to be redefinedaccording to this knowledge.The cognitive transformation of productionand the creation of a semio-capitalist sphere haveopened a new possibility for expansion-and for afew years in the 1990s the economy was able toexpand euphorically, while the Internet economywas expected to furnish a new landscape of infinitegrowth. It was a deception, because even if thegeneral intellect is infinitely productive, the limitsto growth are inscribed in the affective body ofcognitive work: limits of attention, of psychicenergy, of sensibility. After the illusions of the neweconomy (spread by wired neoliberal ideologues)and the eventual dot-com crash, the very beginningof the new century announced the comingcollapse of the financial economy. Since September2008, we have known that {notwithstanding thefinancial virrualization of expansion) the end ofcapitalist growth is in sight.This could be a curse, if social welfare remainsdependent on the expansion of monetary profits,and if we are unable to redefine social needs andexpectations. Bur it could become a blessing if weredistribute social product in an egalitarian way,if we share existing resources, and if we revise ourcultural expectations to be more frugal, replacingthe idea that pleasure depends on ever-increasingconsumption.Language. Econom~·. and tne Body I 77~J

~IRecession and Financial, Impersonal DictatorshipModern culture has equated economic expansionwith futurity, so that for the economists it isimpossible to think the future independently ofeconomic growth. But this identification has tobe abandoned, and the concept of the futurerethought. The mind of the economist cannotmake the jump to this new dimension and cannotunderstand this paradigm shift. This is why theeconomy is a mess, and why economic wisdomcannot cope with the new reality. The financialsemiotization of the economy is a war machinethat destroys social resources and intellectualskills on a daily basis.Look at what is happening in Europe. Aftercenturies of industrial production, the Europeancontinent is rich. It has millions of technicians,poets, doctors, inventors, specialized factoryworkers, nuclear engineers ... So how did we suddenlybecome so poor? Something very simplehappened. The entirety of the wealth that workershave produced was poured into the strongboxes ofa minuscule minority of exploiters and speculators.The whole mechanism of the European financialcrisis is oriented toward the most extraordinarydisplacement of wealth that history has everknown, away from society and toward the financialclass, toward financial capitalism.The wealth produced by the collective intelligencehas been drawn away and diverted. The effectof this displacement is the utter impoverishment ofsome of the richest places in the world, and thecreation of a destructive financial machine thatobliterates use-value and displaces monetary wealth.Recession is the economist's way of semiotizingthe present contradiction between the productivepotency of the general intellect and current financialconstraints.Finance is an effect of the virtualization of reality,acting on the psycho-cognitive sphere of theeconomy. But at the same time, finance is an effectof the deterritorialization of wealth. It's not easy toidentifY financial capitalists as persons. Finance isnot the monetary translation of a certain amount ofphysical goods; it is, rather, an effect of language.Finance is the transversal function of immaterialization,and the performative action ofindexicality.Statistics, figures, indexes, fears, and expectationsare not linguistic representations of some economicreferent that can be found somewhere in thephysical world, signifiers referring to a signified.They are performing indexicals, acts of speech thatproduce immediate effects in the very instant oftheir enunciation.This is why, when you go looking for the financialclass, you cannot locate someone to talk to, ornegotiate with, or an enemy to fight against. There78 I The Uprising: On Poetry anci FinanceLanguage:. Economy. and the Bx!y I 79

are no enemies or people to negotiate with, buronly mathematical implications, automatic socialconcatenations that you cannot dismantle or avoid.Finance seems inhumane and pitiless becauseit is not human and therefore has no pity. It canbe defined as a mathematical tumor traversing alarge part of society. T hose who are involved inthe financial game are much more numerous thanthe property-owners of the old bourgeoisie.Often unwittingly and unwillingly, people havebeen dragged to invest their money and theirfutures in the financial game. Those who haveinvested their pensions in private funds, thosewho have signed mortgages semi-consciously,those who have fallen into the trap of quick credithave all become part of the traversal function offinance. They are poor people, workers, pensionerswhose futures depend on the fluctuations of thestock market that they do not control at all, andthat they do not even understand.Future Exhaustion and Happy FrugalityOnly if we're able to disentangle the future (theperception and conception of the future, and thevery production of it) from the traps of growthand investment, will we find an escape from thevicious subjugation of life, wealth, and pleasure tothe financial abstraction of semio-capital.The key to this disentanglement may be foundin a new form of wisdom which harmonizes withexhaustion. Exhaustion is a cursed word in theframe of modern culture, which is based on thecult of energy and the cult of male aggressivity. Butenergy is fading in the postmodern world, formany reasons that are easy to detect.Energy is fading because of the demographictrend: mankind is growing old, as a whole,because of the prolongation of life expectancy, andbecause of the decreasing birth rate. A sense ofexhaustion results from this process of generalaging, and what has been considered a blessingtheprolonged life expectancy-may prove to be amisfortune, if the myth of energy is not restrainedand replaced with a myth of solidarity and greatcompassion. Energy is also fading because basicphysical resources like oil are doomed to extinctionor dramatic reduction. Finally, energy is fadingbecause competition is stupid in the age of thegeneral intellect. The general intellect is not basedon juvenile impetus and male aggressivity-onfighting, winning, and appropriation. It is basedon cooperation and sharing.This is why the future is over, and we are livingin a space that is beyond the future, If we are ableto come to terms with this postfuturistic condition,we'll renounce accumulation and growth,and will be happy in sharing the wealth from our80 T•·, Ur:.••s n?. On Pco:lrl and F.nar.o:.eLanguage. Economy, an:l tr··e 8o)Qy I 8 1

past of industrial labor and from our present ofcollective intelligence.If we are nor able to do this, we will be doomedto a century of violence, misery, and war.TIME, MONEY, AND LANGUAGEStoring TimeThink about the following sentences:"Give me rime.""You're wasring your time here.""I need more rime."These sentences are meaningless, as they presupposethat rime is something than can be given orwithdrawn, and imply that time is something thatcan be gained or lost, possessed and stored.It is on this kind of absurdity that the economyis based, a technology aimed at the reification andthe accumulation of time.Timebank is a sort of tautology, because banksare essentially about time. What do you store in abank? You store time. In a sense, you are storingyour past, and you are also storing your future.The essential transformation in the passage frommodern bourgeois capitalism to contemporarysemio-capitalism was a shift in the perception ofthe relation between money, language, and time.This is my starting point: the relation betweentime, money, and language. I say that when youtalk about banks, you're talking about storing time.But all the possible ways of storing and investing areeach linked to changes in the history of capitalism,and also in the history of the relationship betweencapitalism and our life, subjectivity, and singularity.It's quite difficult to be systematic about time,so I will not try to be systematic. I will try to findsome reference points that may help us understandsomething about our present. What is happeningin our present, from the point of view of time, language,and events? Well, let's have a look at theEuropean landscape. You see how sad theEuropean landscape is today.I noticed that fact several days ago at the Berlinairport. I was there waiting for my flight, and I sawan old couple with smiling faces looking at thetimetable, and also a young punk girl with tattoos.Everybody looked happy except me. I was the onlysad person in the Berlin airport. I had my ownpersonal reasons to be sad-that's not what I wantto talk about. What is relevant here is that I amEuropean and not German.Take the Greeks, for instance. You know howsad they are, and also how desperate, and angry,too. But when you do not see any hope in your82 I The Upns•ng: On Poetry and FinanceLanguage. Economy. and tile Bocly I 83

-present situation, you're angry and desperate.And the Greeks are angry and desperate. And soare rhe Portuguese, nor to mention the Irish. Theywere happy some years ago, and now, suddenly,rhey are in a different mood-as are all Europeans,except Germans.Do you know why? Because German banks arefull of our time. That's the problem. T he Germanbanks have stored Greek rime, Portuguese time,Italian time, and Irish time, and now rhe Germanbanks are asking for their money back. They havestored the futures of the Greeks, the Portuguese,the Italians, and so on. D ebt is actually futuretime-a promise about the future. Greeks havebeen obliged to promise away their future time,and they have stored rhar promise in Germanbanks.Something is wrong with this exchange. Youtake my (future) time, and then want my moneyback. The crucial mystery, the crucial enigma,rhe crucial secret in the financial age of capitalismis precisely this: is the money that is stored in thebank my past time, (the rime that I have spent inthe past), or is it the money that ensures the possibilityof my buying a future? Well, is it a secret oran enigma?A secret is something that is hidden somewhere.You have to know rhe password, you have to findrhe right key, and then rhe secret will no longer beone. It will become a truth. An enigma is different,because you cannot find a key. The key is nowhere,and also the truth is nowhere. So, when we speakabout fi nancial capitalism, when we argue aboutthe relation between time and future and debt,are we speaking of a secret, or are we speaking ofan enigma?I think we are sp eaking of an enigma, becausenobody knows about the future, nobody knowswhat is hidden in the future rime of debtors. So theonly way to solve this enigma is with violence.Either you pay, or you are our. Either you giveyour present rime as payment for rhe future rimerhar you have stored in German banks, or you'llbecome poor. So in order to avoid being expelledfrom the European Union, the Greeks and rhePortuguese and others are obliged to become poor.Recession, impoverishment, misery: this is the waywe are paying for our (imaginary) future: debt.Floating ValuesYou cannot find truth in financial capitalism,because the essential tool of financial capitalism isthis: truth has disappeared, dissolved. It's no longerthere. There is no more truth, only an exchange ofsigns, only a deterritorialization of meaning. InSymbolic Exchange and Death, a book published in1976, Jean Baudrillard says that rhe whole system84 I TI:e Upns1ng: On Poetry and FimncE:Lan\)uag;,, Economy, and the Booy 1 85

is falling into indeterminacy. This is the essentialshift from industrial capitalism to semio-capitalism:indeterminacy takes the place of the fixed relationbetween labor-time and value, so that the wholeregime of exchange falls into an aleatory system offloating values.Financial capitalism is essentially based on theloss of relation between time and value.In the first pages of Capital, Marx explains thatvalue is time, the accumulation of time. Timeobjectified, time that has become things, goods,and value. But be careful: not just any kind oftime is relevant in the determination of value, butthe average social time that is needed to produce acertain good. If you are lazy, or too fast, that doesnot matter. What is important in the determinationof value is the average time that is needed to producea certain good. This was true in the good olddays when it was possible to determine the timethat was needed to produce something. Thenthings changed: all of a sudden, something newhappened in the organization of work, and in productiontechnology, in the relation between time,work, and value. Suddenly, work is no longer thephysical, muscular work of industrial production.There are no longer material things, but signs; nolonger the production of things which are tangiblevisible materials, but the production of somethingthat is essentially semiotic.When you want to establish the average timethat is needed to produce a material object, youjust have to do a simple calculation: how muchphysical labor time is needed to turn matter intothat good. It's easy to state this, to decide howmuch time is needed to produce a material object.But try to decide how much time it takes to producean idea. Try to decide how much time is necessaryto produce a project, a style, an innovation. Well,you see that when the process of productionbecomes semiotic, the relationship between labortimeand value suddenly evaporates, dissolves intothin air. Baudrillard was the first thinker whounderstood and described this passage.Baudrillard wrote Symbolic Exchange andDeath in 1976. But some years before that, USPresident Richard Nixon did something thatchanged the world. The presidents of the US inthose times were like prophets, not because theypredicted the future zeitgeist, but because theywere powerful enough to imprint their will, orthe will of American capitalism, onto the future.And Nixon did something very, very importantas far as changing the future went. Well, hedecided to free the dollar from the gold standard.He decided that the gold-standard system andthe Bretton Woods system, based on a fixed relationbetween different currencies, was over. Since then,the dollar has been free from any fixed standard.86 / Tile Upns,ng: On Poetry and FinanceLangu3ge. Economy, and the Body / 87

Independent, autonomous-or better, aleatory.Floating, undetermined.Something aleatory is something that cannot bepredicted, fixed, or determined in any way. Latinuses the word ratio in order to describe the fixedrelationship, the standard, the measure. And inphilosophical parlance, ratio refers to the universalstandard of understanding things: reason.After Nixon's decision, measurement ended.Standardization ended. The possibility of determiningthe average amount of time necessary toproduce a good ended. Of course, that means thatthe United States of America, its president,Richard Nixon, decided that violence would take theplace of measurement. In conditions of aleatority,what is the condition of the final decision? What isthe action or process of determining value?Strength, force, violence. What is the final way ofdeciding something-for instance, deciding theexchange rate of the dollar? Violence, of course.Give me time.The conjuncture between violence and thefinancialization of capitalism is not a casual andextemporaneous one. It's absolutely structural. Therecan be no financial economy without violence,because violence has now become the one singlemethod of decision in the absence of the standard.I will here pause in my elaboration of financialcapitalism, but I want to come back to this subjectat the end of this chapter. But first I want to saysomething now about time, forgetting, and thebank, if I can.Fascism Femininity FuturismWe are accustomed-! say "we," meaning mygeneration, the last modern generation-we areaccustomed to thinking about time in terms ofprogress, an endless process of growth, and also interms of perfectibility.The old, modern conception of futurity iscrucial in understanding the way modernity hasthought about time. The best definition of moderntime you can find is in Marinetti's manifesto of1909, "The Futurist Manifesto." Time is crucial to"The Futurist Manifesto." Even, when the futuristsspeak of despising "the woman," they are alsospeaking about time.What is time in "The Futurist Manifesto"? Themanifesto understands time as acceleration, andviews acceleration as a process of increasing potency.This conception of acceleration is new in thehistory of thought and in the history of art. Theidea that one's perception of time can be changedwas already there in Impressionism and inCezanne, but only in the sense of deceleration, inthe sense of a becoming-slow of vision. Let's us notforget that Cezanne has a lot to do with Henri88 I Tt1e Upnsing: On Poetr; and Ftn3nceLanguage. Economy, and the Body / 89

Bergson, who translated the concept of time intothe concept of duration. Bergson speaks of time interms of perception, not extension. This is whyBergson is the philosopher who best interpretsimpressionist and symbolist poetics, as well asthose of futurism. Because Bergson was offering anew perspective on time; he was speaking of timein terms of subjective duration, not in terms of theuniversal category of the human mind.This is the crucial change from the classical ageof bourgeois representation to the late-moderncrisis and proliferation of viewpoints and streamsof perception and consciousness.The possibility of different intensities in temporalperception was introduced by Bergson andCezanne, but especially by Marinetti and theItalian futurists.While the Russian futurists were more interestedin time from the point of view of their literaryand artistic production but were less explicit intheir poetics declarations, Italian futurists weretrying to speak about time from the point ofview of acceleration. And they said somethingthat Paul Virilio has fully explained in h is latecenturybooks: velocity and acceleration are themodern tools of potency; industrial, political,and military potency are based on velocity in thelate-modern age. Masculine potency is essentiallyperceived by Italian futurists as a problem ofacceleration and we must not forget that Italianmodernity was very concerned with the problemof the masculinization of perception: of time, ofpolitics, of power.One cannot understand Italian fascism if onedoesn't start from the need for a defeminization ofcultural self-perception. Italian fascism is based ondespising the woman. Contempt for the woman isone of the crucial points of "The FuturistManifesto," but it's also one of the crucial points ofthe creation of the ridiculous, miserable nationalpride of the Italians. Italians h ave always regardedthemselves from a feminine perspective. The greatnessofltalian culture is femininity, Mediterraneansweetness, taste for life, tenderness, and slowness.If you read Italian poetry- Dante, Petrarch,Torquato Tasso, Giacomo Leopardi, Ugo Foscolo-­it always speaks of Italy as a beautiful woman, as afeminine body, sometimes a wounded or sufferingone (Petrarch: My Italy, though words cannot heal IThe m01tal wounds I So dense, I see on your lovelyflesh ...), but also one with a feeling of pleasure andbrightenjng. When being Italian was not shamefullike it is today, Italy's self-identification was feminine.Then something happened: nationalism, war,industrial competition arrived, and the main concernof Italian national culture became destroyingthis feminine self-perception, and affirm ingaggressivity and ludicrous masculinity: fascism is90 I TI1e LJo,is ng: On Poetry and F nan::eLanguage. Economy, ar j ihs Bod1 / 91

the turning point from feminine self-perception tomasculine assertiveness. In the nineteenth century,Italian national culture became ashamed of thepeaceful femininity of Mediterranean people,and began inoculating itself with testosterone.The result is a farcical show of aggressivity that isperfectly embodied by such murderous, cowardlyclowns as Mussolini and Berlusconi.When you speak of German fascism, it's not fake.It's not ridiculous, it's not funny. It's criminal,murderous, horrible, but not funny. But there issomething that sounds false in Italian history.National pride, military aggressivity, industrialgrowth, and so on: all this is fake. This is why Italianfascism is often perceived as a farce, when unfornmatelyit was not. It was a farce, but a tragic and criminalfarce, that provoked war, death, and devastation.As far as time goes, Italian fascism was aboutforgetting laziness, slowness, and Mediterraneansensitivity, and affirming a different perception oftime, one based on acceleration.The feminine perception of]apanese identity is,in many ways, similar to the Italian one. And themodernization of the Meji restoration was basedfirst of all on the defeminization of Japaneseculture. Think, for instance, of the elimination ofwomen in the environment of the emperor. Fromone day to the next, after 1870, women disappearand warriors appear, and the emperor has tobecome a true man. That kind of hysteria, theridiculous, crazy, murderous hysteria of Italian andJapanese fascism, comes as a consequence of thedenial and forced obliteration of the feminine sideof those cultures.Italian futurism is a good essential introductionto the twentieth century, because the twentiethcentury can be defined as the century that trustedin the future. Futurism asserted the idea that thefuture was the better dimension of time, not thepast. When in fact, futurism is all about thedestruction of the past, and the emphasis on andglorification of the future.Now the glory of the future is over. We nolonger trust the future, as the futurists-and themoderns, in general-did. What has happened?1977I want to focus on the crucial year 1977. I thinkthat 1977 is especially important for many reasons.Don't forget that 1977 is the year when CharlieChaplin dies. The death of that man, in my perception,represents the end of the possibility of agentle modernity, the end of the perception oftime as a contradictory, controversial place wheredifferent viewpoints can meet, conflict, and thenfind progressive agreement. Charlie C haplin is thelast man of modern times-the age of the92 1 The Uprising: On Poetly and FinanceLanguage, Economy. and the Bc{ly I 93

machine, the horrible machine, coming into dailylife and destroying daily life, but also the age ofsocial conflict, of social consciousness, of solidarity.Charlie Chaplin is the man on the watch tower,looking at the city from a perilous vantage point,looking at the city of time, but also at the citywhere time can be negotiated and governed.In 1977, C harlie Chaplin died. But I alsowant to remember that 1977 is the year whenSteve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, in their smallgarage in Silicon Valley, created the user-friendlyinterfaces for the digital acceleration and mandatoryunification of time. The Apple trademark wasregistered in 1977.That same year, the Metropolitan Indians riotedin the streets of Rome and Bologna; and on thebanks of the Thames in the Queen's Jubilee, agroup of young British musicians for the first timecried no future. Don't think about your future. Youdon't have one. What Sid Vicious and the otherSex Pistols screamed and declared in 1977 was thefinal premonition of the end of modern times, theend of industrial capitalism, and the beginning ofa new age, which is an age of total violence: financialglobalization, deregulation, total competition,infinite war.If capitalism wants to continue to exist in thehistory of mankind, then the history of mankindhas to become a site of total violence, because onlyviolence is decisive. Beginning in 1977, the word"competition" becomes the crucial term for economists.I don't know if economics can be considereda science. I don't think it can. I think it is a technology.It is a technology whose aim is the transformationof time into labor, and labor-time into value,and the transformation of our relation with natureinto one of scarcity, need, and consumption.But since 1977, the project of the science ofeconomics (or technology, I don't know) is the submissionof human relationships to one single goal:competition, competition, competition. Now"competition" has become a natural word, a normalword. This is not right, because "competition"means violence, war.This is the meaning of competition. Otherwise,you forget the meaning of words. You forget thatcompetition equals war. Deleuze and Guattari, inA Thousand Plateaus, cry to define fascism, andthey say: fascism is when a war machine is hiddenin every niche, when in every nook and in everycranny of daily life a war machine is hidden. Thisis fascism.So I would say that neoliberalism is the mostperfect form of fascism, in terms of Deleuze andGuattari's definition. Competition is the concealmentof a war machine in every niche of daily life:the kingdom of competition is fascism perfected.94 I TI1e Up:ising: On Poetry and F:nanceLanguage, Economy. and the Body I 95

Semio-inflationI want to say something about semio-inflation,about the special kind of inflation that happens inthe field of information, of understanding, ofmeaning, and of affection.William Burroughs said that inflation is essentiallywhen you need more money to buy lessthings. I say that semio-inflation is when you needmore signs, words, and information to buy lessmeaning. It is a problem of acceleration. It is akind of hyperfuturism when the old accelerativeconception of the future is the crucial tool for thecapitalist goat.Karl Marx has already said something similar.When Marx speaks of productivity, and of relativesurplus value, he's speaking about acceleration.H e says that, if you want to obtain a growthin productivity, which is also a growth in surplusvalue, you need to accelerate work time. But at acertain point acceleration steps and jumps toanother dimension, to what Baudrillard wouldcall hyperacceleration.The acceleration of productivity in the sphereof industrial production is about intensifying therhythm of the machine so that workers are forcedto move faster in manipulating physical matterand producing physical things. When the maintool of production begins to be cognitive labor,then acceleration enters another phase, anotherdimension. Increasing productivity in the sphereof semio-capitalism is essentially a problem ofaccelerating the infosphere.In the sphere of semio-capital, if you want toincrease productivity, what you have to do isaccelerate the infosphere, the environment whereinformation races toward the brain.What happens, then, to our brain-to thesocial brain? Cognition takes time. Think of whatattention is. Attention is the activation of physicalreactions in the brain, and also of emotional,affective reactions. Attention cannot be infinitelyaccelerated. This is why the new economy hasfailed, at the end of the 1990s, after a long periodof constant acceleration.At the beginning of the last decade, in the year2000, the dot-com crash was the consequence of anoverexploitation of the social brain. After the explosionof the Internet bubble, suddenly several booksabout the attention economy appeared in bookstores.All of a sudden, the economists became awareof the simple fact that the market of the semiocapitalistworld is a market of attention. Marketand attention had become the same thing. Thecrisis of 2000, the dot-com crash, was the effect ofan overproduction in the field of attention.Marx speaks of an overproduction crisis: ifyou produce too much of a certain good, people96 I Ths Upns1ng: On Pcet•Y ar.d FinanceLanguage. Economy. anj the Bod;' 1 97

cannot buy all those things, and the goods willremain in the stores, unsold. So, the capitalistbegins firing workers, because he does not need anymore production, and this worsens the situation.This is the overproduction crisis in the frameworkof industrial capitalism. What is the overproductioncrisis when we enter the phase of semio-capital?The overproduction lies in the relation between theamount of semiotic goods produced by cognitivelabor and the amount of time that is disposed of.A society's total quantity of attentive time is notboundless, because attention cannot be acceleratedpast a limit. One can accelerate one's attention;one can take amphetamines, for instance. We havetechniques and drugs that give us the capability ofbeing more productive in the field of attention. Butwe know the problem with that. You know how itends. The 1990s were the dot-corn era, the age ofincreasing productivity, increasing enthusiasm forproduction, increasing happiness of intellectualworkers. But the 1990s were also the decade ofProzac mania. One cannot understand what AlanGreenspan calls "irrational exuberance" withouttaking into account the simple fact that millions ofcognitive workers took tons of cocaine, amphetamine,and Prozac during the 1990s.This can work for a time, and then it ends. All ofa sudden, from one day to the next, after the excitementand the acceleration, comes the apocalypse.CollapseDo you remember the night of the turn of the century,when everybody was waiting for the Y2Kbug? I was in front of my TV, waiting for the finalcollapse, and nothing happened. Nothing. It wasthe most horrible night of my life. I had staked allmy credibility on promising everyone that that nightwould be the final one of our lives, and nothinghappened at all, nothing. But there was an expectationof collapse in the air. How can we explainthat expectation?The collapse did not have to do with the millenniumbug. The collapse represented the fall ofthe Prozac-fueled excitement in the social brain ofthe cognitive workers all over the world. WhenAlan Greenspan, in those months, said, "I feel anirrational exuberance in the markets," he was notspeaking about the economy. He was speakingabout the Prozac crash. He was speaking aboutthe end of the cocaine high in the social brain ofmillions of cognitive workers.What happened next? Well, the next step wasan overproduction crisis in the field of semiocapitalism.In the first years of the century-2000,2001-the problem was the perception of thecoming collapse of capitalism, of the world economy.Then September 11th arrived, and overproductionbecame the solution to everything. Only a mad98 1 The Upris1ng: On Poetry and F1nanceLar.guage, Economy, anc! tl

doctor would prescribe amphetamine to a depressedperson, to a depressed organism. But that is exactlywhat happened after September 11th. The cognitiveworkers' organism, depressed for chemical andeconomic reasons, was submitted to the amphetaminictherapy of war by the mad doctor GeorgeBush. The doctor was mad, and the result of this isnow here: the infinite war.Doctor Bush did not want to win the war. H ewas totally indifferent to winning or losing thewar. It was so evident that starting a war in a placelike Afghanistan, with an ally like Pakistan, iscrazy, and a surefire way to lose. But the problemwas not one of winning or losing: the problemconcerned starting a war that would never end.Infinite war is a sign of the kind of craziness thatis a symptom of the inflation of meaning. Moreand more signs are buying less and less meaning.What does one need when experiencing semioinflation,when the infosphere starts moving fasterand faster, and one's attention is unable to follow?What is needed is some sort of dispositive to makethings easier, a dispositive to reduce the speed ofthe infosphere. It is a problem of time, acceleration,and deceleration: it is a problem of easification.The end of modernity began with the collapseof the future, with Sid Vicious screaming no future.But postmodern history, as far as we have known,has been the history of a techno-linguistic machinerwhichhas increasingly penetrated every recess ofdaily life, every space of the social brain.The techno-linguistic machine is giving languageto human beings, and also raking the place of humanbeings in language for the current generation.The first generation that learned more wordsfrom a machine than from their mothers has aproblem concerning the relationship betweenwords and the body, between words and affection.The separation of language learning from the bodyof the mother and from the body in general ischanging language itself, and is changing the relationbetween language and the body. As far as weknow, throughout human history access to languagehas always been mediated by trust in themother's body. T he relation between the signifierand the signified has always been guaranteed bythe body of the mother, and therefore by the bodyof the other.I know that water is "water" (actually, since Ilearned from my mother how to speak in Italian, Iknow that acqua is "acqua'') because my mother, nota machine, told me "this is acqua." I know that thesignifier points to the signified. My mother told meacqua, and I trust her body. What happens to therelation between language and desire when access tolanguage is disconnected from the body?When the relation between the signifier and thesignified is no longer guaranteed by the presence of100 I Tile Uprising: On Poetry and Fu1an::eLanguage. Economy. and the Bocly / 101

the body, my affective relation to the world startsto be disturbed. My relation to the world becomesfunctional, operational-faster, if you will, butprecarious. This is the point where precariousnessstarts. At the point of disconnection betweenlanguage and the body.3THE GENERAL INTELLECT IS LOOKINGFOR A BODYABSTRACTION AND PATHOLOGYThree Levels of AbstractionIn Marx's writings, abstraction is the main trend ofcapitalism, the general effect of capitalism onhuman activity. Marx means the abstraction ofvalue from usefulness (use value), and the abstractionof productive work from concrete forms ofhuman activity.But in the sphere of semio-capitalism, two newlevels of abstraction appear, as developments of theMarxian abstraction.What does abstraction mean?When Marx talks about abstract labor, he isreferring to the separation of a worker's activity fromconcrete usefulness, which is what happens undercapitalism. The use-value of the worker's product isonly a step toward the real thing, which is value,which is surplus value. So the capitalist does not care1 02 I The Upns1ng On Poet1y ancl Finance103

if his work is producing chickens or books or cars ...He cares only about this: how much value his workcan produce in a given unit of time. This is thebeginning of the process of capitalist abstraction.In the late-modern phase of capitalism, digitalabstraction adds a second layer to capitalistabstraction: transformation and production nolonger happen in the field of bodies, and materialmanipulation, but in the field of interoperativitybetween informational machines. Informationtakes the place of things, and the body is cancelledfrom the field of communication.We then have a third level of abstraction, whichis financial abstraction. Finance means that theprocess of valorization no longer passes throughthe stage of use value, or even the production ofgoods (physical or semiotic).In the old industrial economy described byMarx, the goal of production was already thevalorization of capital, through the extraction ofsurplus value from labor. But in order ro producevalue, the capitalist was still obliged to exchangeuseful things; he was still obliged to produce carsand books and bread.When the referent is cancelled, when profit ismade possible by the mere circulation of money,the production of cars, books, and bread becomesuperfluous. The accumulation of abstract value ismade possible through the subjection of humanbeings to debt, and through predation on existingresources. The destruction of the real world startsfrom this emancipation of valorization from theproduction of useful things, and from the selfreplicationof value in the financial field. Theemancipation of value from the referent leads tothe destruction of the existing world. This is exactlywhat is happening under the cover of the so-calledfinancial crisis, which is not a crisis at all.In his book Data TrdSh (1994), Arthur Krokerand Michael A. Weinstein write that in the field ofdigital acceleration, more information means lessmeaning. In the sphere of the digital economy, thefaster information circulates, the faster value isaccumulated. But meaning slows down thisprocess, as meaning needs time to be produced andto be elaborated and understood. So the accelerationof the info-flow implies an elimination of meaning.In the sphere of the financial economy, theacceleration of financial circulation and valorizationimplies an elimination of the real world. Themore you destroy physical things, physicalresources, and the body, the more you can acceleratethe circulation of financial flows.In Greek, parthenos means virgin. Jesus Christwas created by parthenogenesis. The Virgin Marygave birth ro her son without any engagement inthe reality of sex. The financial economy (like conceptualart) is a parthogenetic process. Actually, the104 I The Upris,ng: On Poetry and F1nanceTI•e General Intellect Is Looking for a Body I 1 05

monetization and financialization of the economyrepresent a parrhogenizarion of the creation ofvalue. Value does nor emerge from a physicalrelationship between work and things, but ratherfrom rhe self-replication of the parrhogeneric forceof finance.As Maurizio Lazzarato points out in his bookThe Making of the Indebted Man, labor is no longerdominated by the physical force of power, but byrhe abstract force of finance: debt.Digital abstraction leads ro the virrualizarion ofthe physical act of meeting, and the manipulationof things. Financial abstraction leads to the separationof rhe circulation of money from the productionprocess of value itself.These new levels of abstraction nor only concernthe labor process-they encompass everyspace of social life. Digitalization and financializarionhave been transforming the very fabric of rhe socialbody, and inducing mutations.The process of production is merging in theinfosphere, and rhe acceleration of productivity istransforming into an acceleration of the informationflows. Mental disorders and psychopathologies aresymptoms of this dual process of virtual derealizationand acceleration.Digital abstraction, and the virrualization ofsocial communication in general, has so deeplytransformed rhe social environment that thecognitive processes of learning, speaking, imagining,and memorizing are affected.In the sphere of neoliberal capitalism, becauseof the capture of feminine nervous and physicalenergies by the machinary of global exploitation,mothers are less and less the source of language:they are separated from the bodies of children bysalaried labor, by rhe networked mobilization oftheir mental energies, and also by the globalizationof the affective marker. Millions of women leavetheir children in Manila and Nairobi and go toNew York or London to look after the children ofcognitive workers who leave their own children athome to go to offices.Mothers are replaced by linguistic machines thatare constantly talking and showing. The connectivegeneration is learning language in a frameworkwhere the relation between language learning andthe affective body rends to be less and less relevant.What are the long-term effects of this separationof language from the mother's body? Whatare the long-term effects of the automation oflanguage learning?I have no final answers to these questions, andwe cannot yet draw final conclusions about theself-consciousness of the first connective generation,which is now entering the scene of the world.The movements erupting in Europe and in the Arabworld may be the first glimpses of a long-term106 I TI1e Upnstng: On Poewy and Fn1a11ceTt1e General lnte1 1 ect Is Locktng iot a Botly I 107

process of self-organization by the precarious,connective generation around the world. Whoknows what the future holds?Over the last decade psychosocial research andthe phenomenology of art, cinema, and novels hasrevealed a growing fragility of the affective relation,and an increase in mental pathologies: attentiondeficit disorders, depression, panic, and suicidalbehavior have been rising in the collective experienceof the new generation.The literary and artistic phenomenology of thefirst decade of this century has told a story ofcreeping disease in the psychosphere. TheCorrections by Jonathan Franzen, Elephant by GusVan Sant, Time by Kim Ki Duk, The SocialNetwork by David Fincher, No One Belongs HereMore Than You by Miranda July, We Have a Popeby Nanni Moretti-to name just some of thebooks and films that seem to me to have graspedthe innermost sentiment of the decade-all displaya landscape of psychic breakdown.In their book Les passions tristes (The sad passions),Miguel Benasayag and Gerard Schmit retracetheir experience as psychoanalysts who have beenworking for many years in the banlieux of Parisamong young people. In their account, the veryperception of the future has changed among theyoung banlieusards, in that the future is no longerconceived as promise, bur as a threat. T he field ofdesire has been invaded by anxiogenous flows: theacceleration of the infosphere has expanded expectations,semiotic stimulation, and nervous excitementup to the point of collapse.Desire and MoneyDesire and money have a controversial relation.Money is about buying; desire is about creating.Deleuze and Guarrari's decisive move, going backto their first collaboration, Anti-Oedipus, was todraw a conceptual distinction between desire andneed. Desire should not be seen as a condition ofscarcity, of manque; rather, it has to be seen as anenhancer of vision, as a creative activity.When money takes the lead in the psychicinvestment of society-as in the aftermath of theneoliberal triumph- desire takes a paradoxicalturn and starts to produce need, scarcity, andmisery. The effect of fin ancial abstraction is theconstant deterritorialization of desire. In the trapsof advertising and consumerism, desire is draggedinto a relation of dependence with the fi nancialmachine. In the 1990s, the credit card systeminvested American desire, opening the way to thedeception of boundless consumption. T he economicinvestment of desire was the originalfo unt of the virtual economy in the 1990s, andthen the explosion of the dot-com bubble in108/lre Upns1ng: On Poetry and F1nanceTne Ger>erallnte"ect Is Lvcivr.g rc.: a &YJy / 109

2000 precipitated a short-circuiting of desire intopanic and depression.Since September 2008, Americans have beensuffering the backlash: unemployment, urbanmisery, social spending cuts, infrastructure decay.The financial ideology is thriving in the contextof social precariousness. When the prospects areuncertain, you are invited to bet on the future.Lottery, net trading, risk-taking-these are theopportunities financial capitalism is offering everybody.Bubbles grow, then bust, and the vast majorityof people lose their money. You can use your creditcard to its limit and beyond, betting on futurerevenues that will not arrive. You are debtor to abank that is thriving thanks to your beingdeceived. Transforming desire into need, thefinancial investment of desire paves the way todependency and misery.The modern bourgeoisie was a strongly territorializedclass, linked to material assets; they were aclass acutely conscious of their relation with territoryand community. Their wealth and prosperitywere based on the ownership of physical assets:factories, houses, goods stored in warehouses. Thewell-being of workers was essential to the creationof a mass market and the thriving of bourgeoiscapitalism.The industrial bourgeoisie exploited workerswith the goal of developing society, and developedsociety in order to extract surplus value fromworkers. The revenue of the financial class, on thecontrary, is not linked to the actual enrichment ofthe territory, of the city, of the bourg. When thebourg goes global, the bourgeoisie disappears, andbourgeois morality dissolves. The bourgeoisunconscious was based on the separation of workand desire, on repression of the sexual drive andpostponement of pleasure.At the end of the bourgeois era, in the aftermathof financial capitalism's triumph, desireinvades the space of the market, and the marketinvades the space of desire. Work and self-realizationhave to merge in the new economic vision:individuals have to become free agents. There is nolonger a distinction between life time and worktime: all of your time has to be devoted to earningmoney, as money has taken the place of desire.As the Italian psychoanalyst Massimo Recalcatihas pointed out in L 'uomo senza inconscio (Manwithout unconscious; 201 0), in the finanical erathe social unconscious explodes, as it is everywhere.Deterritorialization becomes the perpetualcondition of money and of desire.The financial class that dominates the contemporaryscene has neither attachments to territorynor to material production, because its power andwealth are founded on the total abstraction of adigitally multiplied finance. This digital-financial110 Th:: Up·,s•ng. On Pcetr:f and F.roaC~ceThe General Intellect Is Lookn1g tor a Body 1 111

hyperabstraction is liquidating both the livingbody of the planet and the social body.One of the most important effects of the Internetin the economy has been the diffusion of onlinetrading among young professionals and cognitiveworkers: this countless proliferation of investorsensures the impossibity of finding a relationshipbetween personal responsibility and the socialeffects of an investment. More and more often,the economic stake of a financial investment isnegative, destructive of concrete resources. Youcan bet on the closure of a factory, the firing ofworkers, the death of people; you can bet on thespread of a disease. The financial economy canact, and is acting more and more, as a counterproductiveforce, as the accumulation of money isbecoming completely abstracted from the actualcreation of use-value.When the dot-com economy crashed in the firstmonths of 2000, many thought that the virtualworld was doomed to decay. Actually, things haveturned out differently: the nonexistent worldevoked by digital technology has not dissolved, theInternet is here to stay, and the virtualization ofsocial communication did not stop in 2000.But in 2000, the dot-com crash marked anirreversible turn in the social relation between financialcapital and cognitive work. Cognitarians, whohad been able to create enterprise, were disownedand separated from financial power, and finallyconsigned to the role of a precarious work force.The digital mobilization of desire, the accelerationof the infosphere, the overloading of collectiveattention, and an overuse of psychopharmaceuticalstimulants were the psychic triggers of the dot-com/Prozac crash, and that crash opened the door to thedisempowerment of cognitive labor. The dismantlingof the general intellect began in the agonies ofthe dot-com Prozac crash. The euphoric decade ofClinton's imperial illusion gave way to a decade ofinfinite war, global terror, and suicide. The financialcollapse of 2008 is the predictable conclusion of thisage of financial Ersatz, but the financial class doesnot want to recognize the failure, and a dangerousdoubling-down on neoliberal monetarist policies isbeing enforced everywhere around the world.The ideology that fostered the Internet in the1990s was based on a premise of infinite energy,infinite expansion, infinite resources. The oldeconomy-the economy of the old industrialtimes-was based on a premise of scarcity, as it wasbased on material resources that could be exhausted.The new economy, instead, was envisioned as along, unending boom by Peter Schwartz and PeterLeyden, the Wired ideologues. This idea was basedon the premise of the infinite potency of the net.Because the net is an ever-expanding sphere ofimmaterial substance (information), because11 2 1 The Uprising: On Poetry ancl F•nanceThe General lntel•e,~t Is Looi

intellectual productivity is not limited by materialconstraints, the networked economy was expectedto last forever and to provoke an everlasting expansionof market and value.Only one of these premises was true: the netactually is an ever-expanding space, but the infinityof mental energy was an illusion. The wired ideologyhas proven false because the ideologues did notconsider the limits of the subjective side of theeconomy. The attention market went into overload,resulting in a semiotic overproduction. And theglobal mind went crazy because individual brainsand individual bodies are not capable of limitlesslygoing faster and faster and faster. The exhaustibilityof psychic resources is the intrinsic limit of thecybersphere. The dream of the networked economy'sendless boom broke because psychic energy isnot boundless, because the physical resources of theplanet are not boundless, and because the infinitepotency of the networked collective intelligence islimited by the finitude of psychic energy.IMPOSSIBLE FRIENDSHIP(The Logic of Ersatz in Fincher's Facebook Movie)Financial capitalism and precarious work, loneliness,suffering, and the atrophy of empathy andsensibility: this is the subject of David Fincher'sexcellent movie, The Social Network. The story isabout the creation and early diffusion of the socialnetwork Facebook, about one enterprise in the ageof finan cial semio-capitalism. But the focus of themovie shifts to the psychological side of the evolutionof the Internet, in the context of the info-accelerationand stimulus-intensification that broadbandtechnology has made possible. Love, friendship,affection- the whole sphere of emotionality isinvested by the intensification of the rhythm ofthe infosphere.Although the narrative concerns the beginningsof Facebook, and the ensuing legal conflicts andtrials correspond to the real story, biographicaldetails in the film (for instance, the end of a loveaffair in the first scene of the movie) are not necessarilyfactual, but are useful for a full understandingof the affective side of the social life of the cognitarianlabor force.The main character of the film, Mark Zuckerberg,may obviously be described as a winner: he isthe youngest billionaire in the world, and he ownsa company that in only a few years has becomewell-known worldwide with five-hundred millionsubscribers. Nonetheless, it is difficult to see himas a happy person, and he can be described as aloser if you consider his relationships withwomen and colleagues. Friendship seems impossiblefor him, and the success of his website is granted by114 I T11e Up:is1ng: On Poetry and F1nancen·e G9n8ral lnte!lect Is Loo•mg fo· a B0d1• 1 115

the artificial substitution (Ersatz) of friendship andlove with standardized protocols. Existential unhappinessand commercial success can be viewed as twosides of the same coin: Fincher's movie very skillfullyinterprets the psychological needs of Zuckerberg'sgeneration by portraying loneliness and affectivefrustration as his intimate psycho-scape.Desire is diverted from physical contact andinvested in the abstract field of simulated seduction,in the infinite space of the image. The boundlessenhancement of disembodied imagination leads tothe virtualization of erotic experience, infinite flightfrom one object to the next. Value, money, financialexcitement: these are the perfect forms of thisvirtualization of desire. The permanent mobilizationof psychic energy in the economic sphere issimultaneously the cause and the effect of the virtualizationof contact. The very word "contact" comesto mean the exact opposite of contact: not bodilytouch, not epidermic perception of the sensuouspresence of the other, but purely intellectual intentionaliry,virtual cognizability of the other. It is hardto predict what sort of long-term mutation isunderway in human evolution. As far as we know,this virtual investment of desire is currently provokinga pathogenic fragilization of social solidarityand a stiffening of empathic feeling.The genius of Zuckerberg essentially consists inhis ability to exploit the suffering of the crowd, themiserable energies of collective loneliness and frustration.The origin al idea for the website camefrom two rich Harvard twins named Tyler andCameron Winklevoss, who wanted to hireZuckerberg as a programmer. Zuckerberg pretendsto work for them, but actually takes hold of theiridea, although he is much more capable than theyare in terms of linking the project to the psychicneeds arising from contemporary alienation.Did Zuckerberg steal the idea from these twoundergraduates? Yes and no. Actually, in the networkit's impossible to clearly distinguish the differentmoments of the valorization process, because theproductive force of the net is collective, while profitsare private. Here we find the irremediable contradictionbetween the collective intelligence of the netand the private appropriation of its products,shaking the very foundation of semio-capitalism.The movie presents an interesting perspectiveon life and work in the age of precarity. The word"precarious" means aleatory, uncertain, unstable,and it refers not only to the uncertainty of thelabor relation, but also to the fragmentation oftime and the unceasing deterritorialization of thefactors of social production. Both labor and capital,in fact, no longer have a stable relation to territoryor community. Capital flows in the financial circuits,and enterprise is no longer based on territorializedmaterial assets, but on signs, ideas, information,116 / Th; Uccs:nq: On Pceuy and F'nanceThe General Intellect Is Lool-ing for a Body 1 11 7

knowledge, and linguistic exchange. Enterprise isno longer linked to territory and the work processis no longer based on a community of workers,living together in a factory day after day, butinstead takes the form of an ever-changing recombinationof time fragments connected in the globalnetwork. Cognitive workers do not meet in thesame place every day, but remain alone in theirnetworked cubicles, where they answer to therequests of ever-changing employers. The capitalistno longer signs agreements in order to exploit theproductive energies of the worker during his overallworking life. He no longer purchases the entireavailability of the worker. He hires a fragment ofavailable time, a fractal, compatible with the protocolsof interfunctionality, and recombinable withother fragments of time.Industrial workers experienced solidaritybecause they met each other every day and weremembers of the same living community who sharedthe same interests, while the Internet worker is aloneand unable to create solidarity because everybody isobliged to compete in the labor market and in thedaily fight for a precarious salary. Loneliness andlack of human solidarity not only characterize thesituation of the worker, but also that of the entrepreneur.The border separating labor and enterprise isconfused in the sphere of cognitive work. AlthoughMark Zuckerberg is a billionaire, the way hespends his work day is not dissimilar to the way hisemployees spend theirs. They all sit in front ofcomputers and type on keyboards.T he main character of the movie-theZuckerberg portrayed by Fincher-has only onefriend: Edouard Severin, who becomes thefinancer of the initial Facebook enterprise. Whenthe growth of the enterprise demands newfinancers, Zuckerberg does not hesitate to betrayhis only friend.T his is not only characteristic of personal relationsin the financial world, but is unfortunatelyalso characteristic of relations between workers.Although the movie portrays a billionaire, it alsotells the story of the social condition of labor: theimpossibility of friendship in the present conditionof the virtual abstraction of sociality, and theimpossibility of building solidarity in a society thatturns life into an abstract container of competingfragments of time.RESPIRATION, CONSPIRACY, AND SOLIDARITYOnce upon a time, I happened to take part in anaction of the Living T heater. In an old Italian theater,some hundred people met for a collective mantra:an emission of harmonic sounds, shared breathing,and shared sound which lasts in time thanks to a118 I The Upris1ng: On Pcetry and F1nancen-e G~;nsral lnt5 1 1ectls Lc:::l-ing for a Booy I 119

vocal wave which goes from one mouth to thenext, from one body to the next. I want to elaborateon the mantra as a form of composing theinsurgent movement.Let's consider the social relation from the point ofview of harmony and disharmony among breathingsingularities. Organisms meet, conflict, interact incommon space. The wisdom of the Hindu yoginconceives of individual breathing (atman) as a relationof the organism with cosmic breath (prana) andthe physical surrounding environment.Physical organisms interact with the naturalenvironment, with the city, the factory, the air.Psychic organisms also interact with the infosphere,the environment where info-stimulae circulate,influencing psychic reactions.In late-modern times, we experience a growingpollution of air, water, and food. Industrial fall outis provoking an increase in asthma, lung cancer,and respiratory diseases. But there is another kindof pollution which concerns the psychic breathingof individual and collective organisms. Semioticflows which are spread in the infosphere by themedia system are polluting the psychosphere andprovoking disharmony in the breathing of singularities:fear, arudety, panic, and depression are thepathological symptoms of this kind of pollution.Let's understand how singularities are linking inthe social-psychic becoming. Concatenationsbetween conscious and sensmve organisms canhappen as conjunctive concatenations and also asconnective concatenations. Human beings conjointhanks to their ability to linguistically and sensuouslyinteract. The phenomenon of linguistic communicationhas been widely studied by scholars, and weknow that the media can modifY and enrich it, butalso impoverish it.There is another level of the concatenation, sensibility,which sh ould be better understood.Sensibility is the ability of the human being tocommunicate what cannot be said with words.Being available to conjunction, the social organismis open to affections, sensuous comprehension,and social solidari ty. Cultural flows-music andpoetry, as well as psychotropic substances-canfavor, or obstruct and pollute, conjunctive ability.Sensibility is also the faculty that allows us toenter into relation with entities not composed ofour matter, not speaking our language, and notreducible to the communication of discreet, verbal,or digital signs.Sensibility is the ability to harmonize with therhizome.Principles of connection and heterogeneity: anypoint of a rhizome can be connected to anythingother, and must be. [ ... ] Collective assemblages ofenunciation function directly wirhin machinicl120 I The Upns,ng: On Poetry and FinanceT~e Ge~eral lnte :e.::tls L00'

assemblages; it is not impossible to make a radicalbreak between regimes of signs and their objects.[ ... ) The orchid deterritorializes by forming animage, a tracing of a wasp; but the wasp reterritorializeson rhat image. The wasp is neverthelessdererritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid'sreproductive apparatus. But it reterritorializes theorchid by transporting irs pollen. Wasp andorchid, as heterogeneous elements, form a rhizome.(Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 7- 10)On the ontological, teleological, or even thephysical plane, the wasp and the orchid are nothomogeneous. They even belong to rwo differentnatural realms. But this does not prevent themfrom working together in the sense of becoming aconcatenation (s'agencer), and in so doing generatingsomething that was not there before. "Be, Be, Be!"is the metaphysical scream that dominates hierarchicalthought. Rhizomatic thought replies:"Concatenate, Concatenate, Concatenate!"The principle of becoming lies in conjunctiveconcatenation:... a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becomingorchidof the wasp. Each of these becomingsbrings about the dererritorializarion of one termand the reterrirorialization of the other; the twobecomings interlink and form relays in a circulationof intensities pushing the deterritorialization everfurther. There is neither imitation nor resemblance,only an exploding of two heterogeneousseries on the line of flight composed by a commonrhizome that can no longer be attributed to orsubjugated by anything signifying. RemyChauvin expresses it well: "the apamllel evolutionof two beings that have absolutely nothing to dowith each other." (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 10)Conjunction/ConnectionConjunction and connection are rwo differentmodalities of social concatenation. Whilst conjunctionmeans becoming-other, living, and theunpredictable concatenation of bodies, connectionmeans the functional interoperability of organismspreviously reduced to compatible linguistic units.The spreading of the connective modality insocial life (the nerwork) creates the condition of ananthropological shift that we cannot yet fully understand.This shift involves a mutation of the consciousorganism: in order to make the conscious organismcompatible with the connective machine, its cognitivesystem has to be reformatted. Conscious andsensitive organisms are thus being subjected to aprocess of mutation that involves the faculties ofattention, processing, decision, and expression. Infoflowshave to be accelerated, and connective capacity122 I Tha Ucrisw.g: On Poelr>' and F1nanceTI1e General Intellect Is Looking for a Bod:! 1 123

has to be empowered, in order to comply with therecombinant technology of the global net.In order to understand the present anthropologicalshift, we should focus on the meaning ofconjunction and connection.Conjunction is a becoming-other. In contrast,with connection each element remains distinct andinteracts only functionally. Singularities changewhen they conjoin, they become something otherthan what they were before their conjunction.Love changes the lover and the combination ofasignifying signs gives rise to the emergence of apreviously nonexistent meaning.Rather than a fusion of segments, connectionentails a simple effect of machinic functionality. Thefunctionality of the materials that connect is implicitin the connection as a functional modeling that preparesthem for interfacing and interoperabUity. Inorder for connection to be possible, segments mustbe linguistically compatible. Connection requires aprior process whereby the elements that need to connectare made compatible. Indeed, the digital webextends through the progressive reduction of anincreasing number of elements to a format, a standard,and a code that makes compatible different elements.The process of change underway in our time iscentered on the shift from conjunction to connectionas the paradigm of exchange between consciousorganisms. The leading factor of this change is theinsertion of the electronic in the organic-the proliferationof artificial devices in the organic universe,the body, communication, and society. But theeffect of this change is a transformation of the relationshipbetween consciousness and sensibility, andan increasing desensitization in the exchange of signs.Conjunction is the meeting and fusion ofround and irregular shapes that are continuouslyweaseling their way about without precision, repetition,or perfection. Connection is the punctual andrepeatable interaction of algorithmic functions,straight lines, and points that overlap perfectly, andplug in or out according to discrete modes of interactionthat render the different parts compatible to apreestablished standard. The shift from conjunctionto connection as the predominant mode of interactionof conscious organisms is a consequence ofthe gradual digitalization of signs and the increasingmediatization of relations.The digitalization of communicative processesinduces a sort of desensitization to the curve, thecontinuous process of gradual becoming; and asort of sensitization to the code, sudden changes ofstate, and series of discrete signs.Conjunction entails a semantic criterion ofinterpretation. The other, who enters in conjunctionwith you, sends signs whose meanings you mustinterpret, by tracing if necessary the intention, thecontext, the shade, the unsaid.124 I Tt1e Ur,."s'ng: On Poetry and F1nanceThe General Intellect Is Lcc"'ng for a Bc(iy I 125

Connection requires a criterion of interpretationthat is purely syntactic. The interpreter mustrecognize a sequence and be able to carry out theoperation foreseen by the "general syntax" (oroperating system); there can be no margins forambiguity in the exchange of messages, nor can theintention be manifest though nuances. The gradualtranslation of semantic differences into syntacticdifferences is the process that led from modernscientific rationalism to cybernetics, and eventuallymade the creation of a digital web possible.But if you extend the syntactic method of interpretationto human beings, a cognitive and psychicmutation is underway.This mutation is actually producing painfuleffects on the conscious organism, and these effectscan be interpreted with the categories of psychopathology:dyslexia, anxiety and apathy, panic anddepression. However, pathological description doesnot grasp the deep meaning of the question. What ismore important, in fact, is the conscious organism'sattempt to adapt to a changing environment.In order to efficiently interact with the connectiveenvironment, the conscious and sensitive organismstarts to suppress to a certain degree what we callsensibility. This is, in my opinion, the core of thecognitive reformatting that is underway.Sensibility-i.e., the ability to interpret andunderstand what cannot be expressed in verbal ordigital signs-can be useless and also dangerous inan integrated system of connective nature.Sensibility slows interpretation procedures, malcingdecodiflcation aleatory, ambiguous, and uncertain,and thus reducing the competitive efficiency of thesemiotic agent.The ethical dimension is involved in thisprocess: a sort of ethical insensibility seems to markthe behavior of the humans of the last generation.But if we want to understand the disturbance in theethical sphere, we should displace our attentiontoward the aesthetic fleld. The ethical disorder,the inability to ethically manage individual andcollective life, seems to follow from a disturbanceof the aesthesia, the perception of the other andof the self.Composition and RecombinationWhen I say composition, I mean a form ofshared respiration: cospiration, conspiracy, growingtogether, conjoined expectations, coalescinglifestyles.When I say recombination, I mean compatibilityand functional operativity.When the relation between social components(individuals) is predominantly recombinant, thesocial organism stiffens and gets frail: solidari tybecomes difficult.126 I Tile Uprising: On Poetry and FinanceThe Ge'1erallnte'tect Is L•:-okong for a B

Social solidarity is not an ethical or ideologicalvalue: it depends on the continuousness of therelation between individuals in time and in space.The material foundation of solidarity is the perceptionof the continuity of the body in the body,and the immediate understanding of the consistencyof my interest and your interest.The communist conspiracy, for instance, wasthe psychic and cultural energy that made solidaritypossible inside the social body of the industrialworker class, notwithstanding the authoritarianreality of communist realizations.Since the 1980s, precarity has provoked a processof desolidarization and disaggregation of the socialcomposition of work. Virtualization has been acomplementary cause of desolidarization: precarizationmakes the social body frail at the level ofwork, while virtualization makes the social bodyfrail at the level of affection.Inside the precarious conditions of labor, collectivebreath is fragmented, submitted to theaccelerating rhythms of the virtual machine: thefractal fragmentation of labor is parallel andcomplementary to the fractalization of financialcapital. Financial capitalism is deterritorialized andvirtual, and acts as a constant recombination ofvirtual fragments of abstract ownership.Because of the introduction of the connectiveprinciple in social communication, the ability tosympathize weakens, and functional recombinationhappens on impersonal ground.Disempathy is the consequence of thisdisharmonization of social communication. Thesexuality of the fractal body is exposed in theform of panic, and desire is driven simultaneouslyin countless directions, in the frigid orgyof pornography.Rhythm and RefrainLate-modern rhythm has been scanned by theordered noise of the machine. Rock and punkmusic have inherited the knack for mechanicalrhythm, although in the end they turn this giftinto rage against the machine. In his book SonicWarfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear(20 1 0) , Steve Goodman describes the rhythmicaggression against social life:From Hitler's use of the loudspeaker as a mechanismfor affective mobilization during World WarII, through to Bin Laden's audio-taped messages,the techniques of sonic warfare have now percolatedinto the everyday. (Goodman 2002, 5)In order to describe the relation between the surroundingsoundscape and the traces of singularity,Guattari speaks of ritournelle, or refrain.128 I The UDns.-,g: On Pcshy and Fonan:ell1e GE'r~erallntel•ect Is Lwking tc.r a Bxi;' I 129

A child singing in the night because it is afraidof the dark seeks to regain control of events thatdeterritorialized too quickly for her liking andstarted to proliferate on the side of the cosmosand the Imaginary. Every individual, everygroup, every nation is thus "equipped" with abasic range of incantatory refrains. (Guattari2011 , 107)The refrain is an obsessive ritual that allows theindividual-the conscious organism in continuousvariation-to find identification points, and toterritorialize herself and to represent herself inrelation to the surrounding world. The refrain isthe modality of semiotization that allows an individual(a group, a people, a nation, a subculture, amovement) to receive and project the world accordingto reproducible and communicable formats.In order for the cosmic, social, and molecularuniverse to be filtered through individual perception,semiotic filters must act, and we call themrefrains.The perception of time by a society is shaped bysocial refrains.From this perspective, universal time appears tobe no more than a hypothetical projection, a timeof generalized equivalence, a "flattened" capitalistictime. (Guattari 1995, 16)The main cultural transformation of modern capitalismhas been the creation of refrains of temporalperception that pervade and discipline society: therefrain of factory work, the refrain of salary, therefrain of the assembly line.The digital transition has brought along with itnew refrains: electronic fragmentation, informationoverload, acceleration of the semiotic exchange,fractalization of time, competition.The essential feature of refrain is rhythm, andrhythm is a special configuration of the relationbetween singular refrain and universal chaos.Chaos is not the opposite of rhythm, but themilieu of all milieus. There is rhythm wheneverthere is a transcoded passage from one milieu toanother, a communication of milieus, coordinationbetween heterogeneous space-times. (Deleuzeand Guattari 1987, 345)Rhythm is the relation of a subjective flow of signs(musical, poetic, gestual signs) with the environment:the cosmic environment, earthly environment, socialenvironment.Rhythm is everywhere in social life. Work,war, rituals, and social movements each have theirspecial rhythm.At the chaosmotic level, rhythm is the concatenationbetween breathing and the surrounding130 I T11e Upns,ng: On Poetry and FinanceThe General intellect Is LcoJJng fer a Body / 131

universe. In Guattari's parlance, refrain is the onlyway of creating this concatenation, this agencementbetween singularity and environment.At the social level, rhythm is the relationbetween the body and the social concatenation oflanguage.The social environment is marked by refrains,repetitions of gestures and signs that simultaneouslyexpress the singular mode and the relation betweenthe agency and the environment.MantraThe uprising against financial capitalism that beganin the European countries in 20 11 can be seen as amantra, as an attempt to reactivate the conjunctivebody, as a form of therapy on the disempatheticpathologies crossing the social skin and social soul.Upheaval, uprising, insurrection, and dots:these words should not be used in a militaristic sense.The organization of violent actions by the anticapitalistmovement would not be smart, as violenceis a pathological demonstration of impotence whenpower is protected by armies of professional killers.Nevertheless, we'll be witness to massive explosionsof precarious rage and violence, as in England inAugust 2011, as in Rome on October 15th.The uprising will frequently give way to phenomenaof psychopathic violence. These shouldnot surprise us; we should not condemn these actsas criminal. For too long has financial dictatorshipcompressed the social body, and the cynicism ofthe ruling class has become repugnant.The uprising is a therapy for this kind of psychopathology.The uprising is not a form of judgment, but aform of healing.And this healing is made possible by a mantrathat rises, stronger and stronger, as solidarityresurfaces in daily life.It is useless to preach a sermon to those who canonly express their revolt in a violent way. Themedic does not judge, but heals, and the task ofthe movement is to act as a medic, not as a judge.What we should be able to communicate to therioters, the looters, the black bloc, and the casseursis a truth that we have to build together and tospread: that a collective mantra chanted by millionsof people will tear down the walls of Jericho muchbetter than a pickaxe or a bomb.132 I n

4POETRY A ND FINANCEEMANCIPATION OF THE SIGN: POETRY ANDFINANCE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURYMoney and language have something in common:they are nothing and they move everything. They arenothing but symbols, conventions, flatus vocis, butthey have the power of persuading human beings toact, to work, to transform physical things.Money makes things happen. It is the source ofaction in the world and perhaps the only powerwe invest in. Perhaps in every other respect, inevery other value, bankruptcy has been declared,giving money the power of some sacred deity,demanding to be recognized. Economics nolonger persuades money to behave. Numberscannot make the beast lie down and be quiet orsit up and do tricks. Thus, as we suspected allalong, economics falsely imitates science. At best,economics is a neurosis of money, a symptomconcrived to hold the beast in abeyance [ ... ]Thus economics shares the language of psychopathology,inflation, depression, lows andheights, slumps and peaks, investmencs and losses,and the economy remains caught in manipulationsof acting stimulated or depressed, drawingattencion to itself, egotistically unaware of irsown soul. Economists, brokers, accountants, financiers,all assisted by lawyers, are the priests ofthe cui t of money, reciting their prayers to makerhe power of money work without imagination.(Sardello 1983, l-2)Financial capitalism is based on the autonomizationof the dynamics of money, but more deeplyon the autonomization of value production fromthe physical interaction of things.The passage from the industrial abstraction ofwork to the digital abstraction of world implies animmaterialization of the labor process.Jean Baudrillard has proposed a general semiologyof simulation based on the premise of the endof referentiality, in the economic as well as in thelinguistic field. In The Mirror of Production,Baudrillard writes: "need, use value, and the referent'do not exist.' T hey are only concepts producedand projected into a generic dimension by thedevelopmen t of the very system of exchangevalue." (Baudrillard 1975, 30)134Poetry and F1nanca I 135

The process of the auronomization of money isa particular level of this general trend, but it alsohas a long history, according to Marc Shell inMoney, Language, and Thought.Between rhe elecrrum money of ancient Lydiaand rhe electric money of contemporaryAmerica there occurred a historically momentouschange. The exchange value of the earliestcoins derived wholly from the material substance(elecrrum) of rhe ingots of which rhecoins were made and nor from rhe inscriptionsstamped into these ingots. The eventual developmentof coins whose politically authorizedinscriptions were inadequate ro rhe weights andpurities of rhe ingots into which the inscriptionswere stamped precipitated awareness of quandriesabout the relationship between face value(intellectual currency) and substantial value(material currency). This difference betweeninscription and thing grew greater with theintroduction of paper moneys. Paper, the marerialsubstance on which the inscriptions wereprinted, was supposed to make no difference inexchange, and metal or elecrrum, rhe materialsubstance to which the inscriptions referred, wasconnected with those inscriptions in increasinglyabstract ways. With the advent of electronicfund-transfers the link between inscription andsubstance was broken. The matter of electricmoney does not matter. (Shell 1982, I)As I've already said, the dephysicalization of moneyis part of the general process of abstraction whichis the all-encompassing tendency of capitalism.Marx's theory of value is based on the conceptof abstract work: because it is the source and themeasure of value, work has to sever its relationto the concrete usefulness of its activity andproduct. Concrete usefulness does not matterfrom the point of view of valorization.Baudrillard speaks of the relation between significationand language in the same vein. Theabstraction process at the core of the capitalistcapture (subsumption) of work implies abstractionfrom the need for the concreteness of products: thereferent is erased.The rational, referential, historical and functionalmachines of consciousness correspond ro indusuialmachines. The aleatory, nonreferential, rransferential,indeterminate and floating machines ofthe unconscious respond to the aleatory machinesof the code[ ... ] The systemic strategy is merely roinvoke a number of floating values in this hyperreality.This is true of the unconscious as it is ofmoney and theories. Value rules according to rheindiscernible order of generation by means of136 I The Upristng: On PoetJY and FtnancePcetry and Rn~nce I 137

models, according to the infin ite chains of simulation.(Baudrillard 1993, 3)The crucial point of Baudrillard's critique is thatreferentiality and the (in)determination of value hascome to an end. In the sphere of the market, thingsare not considered from the point of view of theirconcrete usefulness, but from chat of theirexchangeability and exchange value. Similarly, inthe sphere of communication, language is tradedand valued as something chat is performed.Effectiveness, not truth value, is the rule of languagein the sphere of communication. Pragmatics,not hermeneutics, is the methodology for understandingsocial communication, particularly in theage of new media.Retracing the process of dereferentialization inboth semiotics and economics, Baudrillard speaksof the emancipation of the sign.A revolution has put an end to this "classical"economics of value, a revolution of value itself,which carries value beyond its commodity forminto its radical form.This revolution consists in the dislocation ofthe rwo aspects of the law of value, which werethought to be coherent and eternally bound as ifby a natural law. Referential value is annihilated,giving the stmctural play of value the upper hand.The structural dimension becomes autonomousby excluding the referential dimension, and isinstituted upon the death of reference [ ... ] fromnow on, signs are exchanged against each otherrather than against the real (it is not that they justhappen to be exchanged with each other, they doso on condition that they are no longer exchangedagainst the real). The emancipation of the sign.(Baudrillard, 1993, 6-7)The emancipation of the sign from the referentialfunction may be seen as the general trend of lateModernity, the prevailing tendency in literatureand art as in science and in policies.In the following pages I want to retrace theevolution of poetry in the passage from romanticrealism to symbolist transrealism.Symbolism opened a new space for poeticpraxis, starting from the emancipation of the wordfrom its referential task.The emancipation of money-the financialsign-from the industrial production of thingsfollows the same semiotic procedure, from referentialto nonreferential signification.But the analogy between economy and languageshould not mislead us: although m oney and languagehave something in common, their destinies donot coincide, as language exceeds economic exchange.Poetry is the language of nonexchangeability, the138 1 rne Upr,s.ng. On Poetr; and RnancePQt;iry ano Fonance 139

eturn of infinite hermeneutics, and the return ofrhe sensuous body of language.I'm talking about poetry here as an excess oflanguage, a hidden resource which enables us to shiftfrom one paradigm to another.A PLACE WE DO NOT KNOWAngel, if there were a place we do nor know, and thereOn some ineffable carpet, the lovers, who neverCould achieve fulfillment here, could showTheir bold lofty figures of heart-swings,Their towers of ecstasy, their pyramidThat long since, where there was no standing-ground,Were cremblingly propped cogether-

The full deployment of the general intellect fallsbeyond the sphere of capitalism.When general intellect will be able to reconstituteits social and erotic body, capitalist rule willbecome obsolete. This is the new consciousness thatcomes from the explosion of the last months of2010,from the reclamation of knowledge's autonomy.In the same period of the student revolt, theWikileaks event has exposed the other face ofcognitarian subjectivation. What is its meaning,beyond the remarkable effect that Wikileaks hashad in the field of diplomacy and politics and war,and obviously in the field of information?Wikileaks has displayed the infinite potency ofthe collective networked intelligence. The unleashingof the creative force of the general intellect is themomentous event that Julian Assange has beenable to orchestrate. I don't think that we reallyneeded to know the contents of all those cablesand e-mails that Wikileaks disclosed. Actually, wealready knew that diplomats are paid to lie, andthat soldiers are paid for killing civilians.Many interesting things have come out fromthe disclosures, but this is not my focus here. Whatis more important concerning this event is the activationof solidariry, compliciry, and independentcollaboration between cognitarians that it represents:between programmers, hardware technicians,journalists, and artists who all take part in aninformational process. T he activation of the potencyof this connected intelligence, autonomously fromits capitalist use, is the lesson Wikileaks has tooffer. And the new generation of rebels will find inthis lesson a way to the autonomization and selforganizationof the general intellect.In street demonstrations, the social and eroticbody of the cognitarians is finding rhythm andempathy. The main stake of street actions is thereactivation of the body of the general intellect.Bodily sensibiliry, blurred and stressed by precariryand competition, are finding new modes of expression,so that desire may begin flowing again.Connection and SensibilitySensibiliry is the abiliry to understand what cannotbe verbalized, and it has been a victim of the precarizationand fractalization of time. In order toreactivate sensibiliry, art and therapy and politicalaction have to all be gathered.In the sphere of precarious work, time hasbeen fragmented and depersonalized. Social timeis transformed into a sprawl of fractals, compatiblefragments that can be recombined by the networkedmachine: this is why I speak of the fractalizationof time.Aesthetic perception- here properly conceivedof as the realm of sensibiliry and aesthesia- is142 / n,e Upris:ng: On Poetry ancl FinancePoetry and F•nance I 143

direcrly involved in the technological transformationof communication and work: in its attempt toefficiently interface with the connective environment,the conscious organism appears to increasinglyinhibit what we call sensibility. By sensibility, Imean the faculty that enables human beings tointerpret signs rhar are nor verbal nor can be madeso, the ability to understand what cannot beexpressed in forms that have a finite syntax. T hisfaculty reveals itself to be useless and even damagingin an integrated connective system, because sensibilitytends to slow down the processes of interpretation,making them ambiguous and downgradingthe competitive efficiency of rhe semiotic agent.Sensibility is in rime, and we need time tounderstand the hypercomplex communication ofthe body. Due to the acceleration of the inforhythm,precarious workers are obliged to detectand interpret signs ar an ever-accelerating pace,and their sensibility is disturbed. T his is whytherapy is increasingly involved in the politicalfield of reactivating the social body and recomposingwork in a process of subjecrivarion.If we want to think through the relationbetween art and {schizo) therapy, we have ro thinkin terms of the refrain. Guattari says that rherefrain is a semiotic concatenation (agencement)that is able to larch onto the environment. Cosmic,terrestrial, social, and affective environments canbe grasped and internalized thanks to refrainsthat we have in our minds, in our sensitive andsensible brains.In his book Chaosmosis, G uatrari speaks of rhe"aesthetic paradigm." This concept redefines rhehistorical and social perspective, and ir is fullyintegrated into the vision of ecosophy. An environmentalconsciousness adequate ro the technologicalcomplexity of hypermodernity, ecosophy is basedon the acknowledgment of the crucial role ofaesthetics in the prospect of ecology.Actually, aesthetics is the science dedicated tothe study of the contact between the derma (theskin, the sensitive surface of our body-mind) anddifferent chemical, physical, electromagnetic, electronic,and informational flows. Therefore, aestheticshas much to do with the modern psychopathologyof contact, with the pathological effects of theacceleration of the info-flow and the precarizarionof social existence. Guattari views the universe as acontinuum of diverse and interrelated entities inbodily contact with each other. It is both an organicand inorganic continuum, animal and machinic,mental and electronic, and the concatenation ismade possible by ritournelles, semiotic markers ofrhythm. Rhythm is the common substance of signs(word, music, vision) and the brain. The mind hooksonto the other (the other mind, nature, artificial, orsocial world) thanks to rhythmic concatenation.144 I Tile Unnsng. On PcetrJ ar.::l FinancePoetry and F.nan:e I 145

In the past century, the century that trusted inthe future, art was essentially involved in the businessof acceleration. Futurism defined the relationbetween art, the social mind, and social life. Thecult of energy marked the artistic zeitgeist, up tothe saturation of collective perception and theparalysis of empathy. Futurist rhythm was therhythm of info-acceleration, of violence and war.Now we need refrains that disentangle singularexistence from the social game of competition andproductivity: refrains of psychic and sensitiveautonomization, refrains of the singularization andsensibilization of breathing, once unchained fromthe congested pace of the immaterial assembly lineof semio-capitalist production.Once upon a time, pleasure was repressed bypower. Now it is advertised and promised, andsimultaneously postponed and deceived. This isthe pornographic feature of semio-production inthe sphere of the market.T he eye has taken the central place of humansensory life, but this ocular domination is a dominationof merchandise, of promises that are neverfulfilled and always postponed. In the currentconditions of capitalist competition, accelerationis the trigger for panic, and panic is the premise todepression. Singularity is forgotten, erased, andcancelled in the erotic domain of semio-capitalism.T he singularity of the voice and the singularity ofwords are subjected to the homogenization ofexchange and valorization.Social communication is submitted to technolinguisticinterfaces: in order to exchange meaning inthe sphere of connectivity, conscious organisms haveto adapt to the digital environment.In order to accelerate the circulation of value,meaning is reduced to information, and technolinguisticdevices act as the communicative matrix.The matrix takes the place of the mother in theprocess of generating language.But language and information do not overlap,and language cannot be resolved in exchangeability.In Ferdinand de Saussure's parlance, we may saythat the infinity of the parole exceeds the recombinantlogic of the langue, such that language canescape from th e matrix and reinvent a social sphereof singular vibrations intermingling and projectinga new space for sharing, producing, and living.Poetry opens the doors of perception to singularity.Poetry is language's excess: poetry is what inlanguage cannot be reduced to information, and isnot exchangeable, but gives way to a new commonground of understanding, of shared meaning: thecreation of a new world.Poetry is a singular vibration of the voice. Thisvibration can create resonances, and resonancesmay produce common space, the place where:146 1 The Upris,ng: On Poetry and FtnancePoehy ana Ftnance I 14 7. t.' -~ ' •. ~·. i•'

lovers, who neverCould achieve fulfillment here, could showTheir bold lofty figures of heart-swings,Their towers of ecstasy.VagrantsBut tell me, who are these vagrants, these even a littleMore transitory than we, these from the startViolently wrung (and for whose sake?)By a never-appeasable will? But it wrings them,Bends them, slings them and swings them,Throws them and catches them; as if from an oily,More slippery air they come downOn the carpet worn thinner by their eternal leaping,This carpet lost in the universe.Stuck there like a plaster, as if the skyOf the suburb had hurt the earth.-Rilke: "Fifth Elegy," verses 1- 11These verses can be read simultaneously as ametaphor for the condition of precarity, and as anannunciation of a place that we don't know, thatwe have never experienced: a place of the city, asquare, a street, an apartment where suddenlylovers, who here (in the kingdom of valorizationand exchange) never "could achieve fulfillment,"toss their last ever-hoarded, ever hidden, unknowntous-eternally valid coins of happiness.There is no secret meaning in these words, butwe can read in these verses a description of the frailarchitectures of collective happiness: "Their towersof ecstasy, their pyramid that long since, where therewas no standing-ground were tremblingly proppedtogether."This place we don't know is the place we arelooking for, in a social environment that has beenimpoverished by social precariousness, in a landscapethat has been deserted. It is the place thatwill be able to warm the sensible sphere that hasbeen deprived of the joy of singularity. It is theplace of occupation, where movements are gathering:Tahrir square in Cairo, Plaza do Sol in Madrid,and Zuccotti Park in New York City.We call poetry the semiotic concatenation thatexceeds the sphere of exchange and the codifiedcorrespondence of the signifier and signified; itis the semiotic concatenation that creates newpathways of signification and opens the way to areactivation of the relation between sensibility andtime, as sensibility is the faculty that makes possiblethe singularity of the enunciation and the singularityof the understanding of a noncodified enunciation.Viktor Shklovsky, the Russian formalist theorist,says that the specificity of literary language lies in theability to treat words according to an unrepeatablesingular procedure, that in Russian he calls priem:an artificial treatment of verbal matter generating148 1 The Up•is ng: On Poetry a'ld Finat1::ePoetry and F1Pance / 149

effects of meaning never seen and codified before.Poetical procedure is a form of enstrangement(ostranenie, in Russian) that carries the word farand away from its common use."Art is not chaos," say Deleuze and Guattari inWhat Is Philosophy?, "bur a composition of chaosthat yields the vision or sensation, so that it constitutes,as Joyce says, a chaosmos" (Deleuze andGuarrari 1994, 204-205). T he relation betweenthe organism and the environment is disturbed bythe acceleration of info-stimula in the infosphere,by semiotic inflation, and by the saturation ofattention and the conscious sensitive sphere ofsubjectivity. Art is recording and detecting thisdissonance, as it simultaneously creates the aestheticconditions for the perception and expressionof new modes of becoming.Relative to schizoanalysis, art is acting differentlyin two ways: it represents a diagnostic of theinfospheric pollution of the psychosphere, butalso a therapy treating the disturbed organism.The refrain is the sensitive niche where we cancreate cosmos elaborating chaos.Social movements can be described as a form ofrefrain: movements are the refrain of singularization,as they act to create spheres of singularity atthe aesthetic and existential levels.In the process of singularization that the movementmakes possible, production, need, and con-sumption can be semiotized again, according to anew system of world expectations.Changing the order of expectations is one of themain social transformations that a movement canproduce: this change implies a cultural transformationbut also a change in sensitivity, in the openingof the organism to the world and to the others.Insurrection is a refrain helping to withdraw thepsychic energies of society from the standardizedrhythm of compulsory competition-consumerism,and helping to create an autonomous collectivesphere. Poetry is the language of the movement asit tries to deploy a new refrain.The Limits of the WorldIn the chapter of Chaosmosis that is dedicated to theaesthetic paradigm, G uarrari speaks of the newmodes of the submission and standardization of subjecti~ity produced by network technologies and byneol1beral globalization. Simultaneously, he tries toflnd new pathways to autonomous subjectivation.As far as concerns the fl rst side of rhe problem,he writes:Subjectivity is standardized through a communicationwh ich evacuates as m uch as possibletrans-semiotic and amodal en unciative compositions.Thus it slips towards the p rogressive150 1 The Upros•ng: On Poetry and F1nar.cePoetry a• •0 Finar.c'" 151

effacement of polysemy, prosody, gesture, mimicryand posture, to the profit of a language rigorouslysubjected to scriptural machines and their massmeclia avatars. In its extreme contemporary formsit amounts to an exchange of information tokenscalculable as bits and reproducible on computers.In this type of deterritorialised assemblage, thecapitalist Signifier, a simulacrum of the imaginaryof power, has the job of overcoding all theother Universes of value. (Guattari 1995, 104-5)Digital technology is canceling the singular enunciativecomposition of polysemy, gesture, andvoice, and tends to produce a language that issubj ected to the linguistic machinery. While analyzingthe standardization of language, Guattarisimultaneously looks for a line of escape from theinformational submission (assujettissement).An initial chaosmic folding consists in makingthe powers of chaos co-exist with those of thehighest complexity. It is by a continuous comingand-goingat an infinite speed that the multiplicitiesof entities differentiate into ontologically heterogeneouscomplexions and become chaotised inabolishing their figural diversity and byhomogenising themselves within the same beingnon-being.In a way, they never stop diving intoan umbilical chaotic zone where they lose theirextrinsic references and coordinates, but fromwhere they re-emerge invested with new chargesof complexity. It is during this chaosmic foldingthat an interface is installed-an interfacebetween the sensible finitude of existentialTerritories and the trans-sensible infinitude ofthe Universe of reference bound to them. Thusone oscillates, on the one hand, between a finiteworld of reduced speed, where limits always loomup behind limits, constraints behind constraints,systems of coordinates behind other systems ofcoordinates, without ever arriving at the ultimatetangent of a being-matter which recedes everywhereand, on the other hand, Universes of infinitespeed where being can't be denied anymore, whereit gives itself in its intrinsic d ifferences, in itsheterogeneous qualities. The machine, everyspecies of machine, is always at the junction ofthe finite and infinite, at this point of negotiationbetween complexity and chaos. (Guanari 1995,110- 111)Guattari here questions the relation between thefinite and infinite in the sphere of language. H eis mapping the territory of the informational rhizome,that was not yet completely discoveredwhen Chaosmosis was written. T he ambiguity ofthe info-rhizomatic territory is crystal clear:info-technology is standardizing subjectivity and152 1 The Upns,ng. On Peevy and FinancePoetry and Finance I 1 53•· .• : .. & r r. ~-

language, inscribing techno-linguistic interfaceswhich automatize enunciation.We are tracing here the dynamic of a disaster,the disaster that capitalism is inserting into hypermodernsubjectivity, the disaster of accelerationand panic. But simultaneously we have to look fora rhythm which may open a further landscap.e, alandscape beyond panic and beyond the precanousaffects of loneliness and despair.In the chapter on aesthetic paradigm inChaosmosis, Guattari rethinks the question ofsingularity in terms of sensitive finitude and thepossible infinity of language. .T he conscious and sensitive orgamsm, theliving individuality walking towards extinction, isfinite. But the creation of possible universes ofmeaning is infinite. Desire is the field of thistendency of the finite towards a becoming-infinite.infinity which are not only virtual, but also apotentiality of life, and that can be actualized insituations.We are on rhe threshold of a deterrirorialized andrhizomaric world, realizing the anrioedipal, schizoformdream. Bur this dream is becoming true in theform of a global nightmare of financial derealization.On this threshold we have to imagine a politics andan ethics of singularity, breaking our ties with expectationsof infinite growth, infinte consumption, andinfinite expansion of the sel£In the preface to his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,Wirrgenstein writes: "in order to draw alimit to thinking we should have to be able rothink both sides of this limit (we should thereforehave to be able to think what cannot be thought)."(Wirrgensrein 1922, 27)And he also writes:To produce new infinities from a submersion insensible finitude, infinities not only charged withvirtuality but with potentialities actualisable ingiven situations, circumventing or dissociatingoneself from the Universals itemised by traditionalarts, philosophy, and psychoanalysis [ .. . ] a newlove of the unknown ... (Guattari 1995, 161)The finitude of the conscious and sensitive organismis the place where we imagine projections ofThe lim irs of my language mean the limits of myworld. Logic pervades the world: the limits of theworld are also its limits. So we cannot say inlogic, "The world has this in it, and this, bur northat." For that would appear ro presuppose thatwe were excluding certain possibilities, and thiscannot be the case, since it would require thatlogic should go beyond the limits of the world;for only in that way could it view those limitsfrom the other side as well. We cannot think154 1 Tl1e Upris1ng: On Pc etr1 and Finan:;ePo'"try and F1nanr:e I 155

what we cannot think; so what we cannot thinkwe cannot say either. (Wittgenstein 1922, 68)And finally, he writes: "The subject does not belongto the world: rather, it is a limit of the world."When W ittgenstein says that the limits of languageare the limits of the world, he is sayingsomething that should be read in two differentways. First, he is saying: what we cannot say wecannot do, we cannot experience, we cannot live,because only in the sphere of language can weinteract with the reality of Being. But he is alsosaying that, because the world is what resideswithin the limits of our language, what thereforelies beyond the limits of language will only be ableto be lived and experienced once our language isable to elaborate that sphere of Being that liesbeyond the present limit.In fact, the philosopher writes: "the subjectdoes not belong to the world, rather it is a limitof the world."The potency and extension of languagedepends on the consistency of the subject, on hisor her vision, on his or her situation. And theextension of my world depends on the potencyof my language.Guattari calls "chaosmosis" the process of goingbeyond the limits of the world, and he calls thisgoing beyond resemiotization: i.e., a redefinitionof the semiotic limit, which is also the limit of theexperimentability of the world.Scientists call this effect of auropoietic morphogenesis"emergence": a new form emerges andtakes shape when logical linguistic conditionsmake it possible to see it and to name it. Let's tryto understand our present situation from thispoint of view.Digital financial capitalism has created aclosed reality which cannot be overcome with thetechniques of politics, of conscious organizedvoluntary action, and of government.Only an act of language can give us the abilityto see and to create a new human condition, wherewe now only see barbarianism and violence.Only an act of language escaping the technicalautomatisms of financial capitalism will makepossible the emergence of a new life form. The newform of life will be the social and instinctual bodyof the general intellect, the social and instinctualbody that the general intellect is deprived of insidethe present conditions of financial dictatorship.Only the reactivation of the body of the generalintellect- the organic, existential, historical finitudethat embodies the potency of the generalintellect-will be able to imagine new infinities.In the intersection of the finite and infinite, in thepoint of negotiation between complexity and chaos,it will be possible to generate a degree of complexity156 / The Upnsu1g: On Poetry and F;nancePcetry ano F.narce 1 157

greater than the degree of complexity that financialcapitalism is able to manage and elaborate.Language has an infinite potency, but the exerciseof language happens in finite conditions ofhistory and existence. Thanks to the establishmentof a limit, the world comes into existence as aworld of language. Grammar, logic, and ethics arebased on the institution of a limit. But infinityremains unmeasurable.Poetry is the reopening of the indefinite, theironic act of exceeding the established meaningof words.In every sphere of human action, grammar isthe establishment of limits defining a space ofcommunication. Today the economy is the universalgrammar traversing the different levels of humanactivity. Language is defined and limited by its economicexchangeability: this effects a reduction oflanguage to information, an incorporation of technolinguisticautomatisms into the social circulationof language.Nevertheless, while social communication is alimited process, language is boundless: its potentialityis not limited to the limits of the signified.Poetry is language's excess, the signifier disentangledfrom the limits of the signified.Irony, the ethical form of the excessive power oflanguage, is the infinite game that words play tocreate and to skip and to shuffle meaning.~ social movement, at the end of the day, shoulduse Irony as semiotic insolvency, as a mechanism ofdisentangling language, behavior, and action fromthe limits of the symbolic debt.IRONY AND CYNICISMMass ZynismusIn his book The Courage of Truth, a transcriptionof lectures delivered at the College de France in1984, Michel Foucault speaks of Diogenes and theother ancient philosophers known as cynics, anddefines their thought as a practice of telling thetruth (parrhesia). Twenty-five years later, the wordcynicism has acquired a totally different meaning,almost the opposite: the cynic is someone whoroutinely lies to everyone, especially to him or herself.An intimate lie, the contradiction betweenspeech and belief, lies at the core of contemporarycynicism. Still, there remains a kind of consistencybetween the ancient notion of cynicism-rigoroustruthfulness, individualism, ascetic behavior, anddisdain for power-and our own, which consistslargely of lip service, moral unreliability, andconformist subjugation to those in power. Thisconsistency lies in an awareness of the ambiguousnature of language, and an ability to suspend the158 / Tn"' Up~151ng: 0:1 Poetry and FinancePoetry ancl Finance 1 159

elation between language and reality, particularlyin the ethical sphere. Cynicism, therefore, is closelyrelated to irony. Both are rhetorical forms andethical stances that require the suspension of therelation between reality and language. SomeGerman philosophers, like Paul Tillich and PeterSloterdijk, use two different words to distinguishthe ancient Greek cynicism discussed by Foucaultand our own: kynismus and zynismus.Modern zynismus can be understood by recallingStanley Kubrick's 1999 film, Eyes Wide Shut, anartistic gravestone to the modern illusion of progressiveEnlightenment. Bill and Alice, a happilymarried couple (Fridolin and Albertine in ArthurSchnitzler's novel Dream Story [ 1926], whichinspired Kubrick's screenplay) are expressions ofan awareness that truth can never be spokenbecause the social game is based on the power oflies. If you don't accept the language of deceit, noone will listen to you. This is where Kubrick's surveyof the twentieth century arrives. It began withDax: the upright colonel played by Kirk Douglas,who fights the cowardice of military power inPaths of Gl01y (1957). Dax believes in ethicalrighteousness. He has the strength and courage tooppose evil because he thinks that evil can bestopped and defeated.Bill Harford (played by Tom Cruise) in EyesWide Shut is still able to recognize misdeeds anddistinguish right from wrong, but he knows thatnothing can be done to stop and defeat evil.Despite moral unhappiness, he must bend to evilif he wants to survive.At the end of a century that believed in thefuture, zynismus seems to be the only acceptedlanguage, the only cool behavior. "Cool" is a keywordin contemporary cynicism. Andre Glucksmann, inhis 198 1 book Cynicism and Passion, suggests thatthe only alternative to cynicism is passion, butthat's wrong.T he real alternative to cynicism is not passion,but irony.In Critique of Cynical Reason, Peter Sloterdijkargues that cynicism is the prevailing mindsetthroughout the post-'68 era. To Sloterdijk, cynicismdoesn't denote an exceptional social character: itis the typical state of mind. As he describes theancient notion of cynicism, "It violates normalusage to describe cynicism as a universal anddiffuse phenomenon; as it is commonly conceived,cynicism is not diffuse but striking, notuniversal but peripheral and highly individual."(Sioterdijk 1988, 4) And this is the most importantdifference between kynismus and zynismus:while D iogenes and his fellow kynicists wereascetic individualists rejecting the acquiescence tothe law of the powerful, the modern zynicists arethe conformist majority, fully aware that the law160 1 n.e Upris•ng: On Poetry ana Fi11anc€:

Tof the powerful is bad, but bending to it becausethere's nothing else to do. Unlike the ancientcynism, modern zynismus is not disruptive. It isan internalization of the impotence of truth. AsSloterdijk writes:... [T]his is the essential point in modern cynicism,the ability of its bearers to work, in spite ofanything that might happen, and especially, afteranything that might happen ... cynics are notdumb, and every now and then they certainly seethe nothingness to which everything leads. Theirpsychic (seelish) apparatus has become elasticenough to incorporate as a survival factor a permanentdoubt about their own activities. Theyknow what they are doing, but they do itbecause, in the short run, the force of circumstancesand the instinct for self-preservation arespeaking the same language; and they are tellingthem that it has to be so. (Sioterdijk 1988, 5)Contemporary mass cynicism can be linked to twodifferent sources: the failure of twentieth-centuryutopian ideologies, and the perception that theexploitation of labor, competition, and war areinevitable and irreversible. Mass cynicism resultsfrom the dissolution of social solidarity. Globalizationand the systemic precariousness of the labormarket resulting from neoliberal deregulation haveimposed competition as the inescapable, generalizedmode of relation among social actors. Workers, oncelinked by a sense of social solidarity and commonpolitical hope, are now forced to think in cynicalterms: survival of the fittest.Within the '68 movement, different culturesand political tendencies coexisted. Some dreamedof the historical Aujhebung: the institution of aproletarian dictatorship, who would seize power intheir own hands. Like Hegelians, the doctrinaireMarxists dreamed of a triumph of reason in whichthe good guys were destined to win. To remainwith the proletariat was to be on the winning sideof history. When the wind turned and the workers'movement was defeated, neoliberalism providedan ideology for a new wave of capitalist aggressivity.Those who wished to remain on the winning sideof history decided to stay with the winners becauseall that is real is rational, in the end! In their dialecticalscheme, whoever wins is right, and whoever isright is destined to win.The majority '68-era activists were not orthodoxdialecticians and did not expect anyAujhebung. We never believed in the end of historicalcomplexity and the final establishment ofthe perfect form of communism. This soundedfalse to students and young workers, who wereseeking autonomy in the present, not communismin the future.162 I Tile Upns•ng: On Poetry and F1nancePoetry and F,nance I 163

Today's neoliberal conformists are the pervertedheirs of'68. Those who came to power after '89 inRussia, the US, and Europe are not as free fromideology as they pretend. Their ideology is adogmatic faith in the unquestionability of theeconomy. The economy has taken the place of theall-encompassing Hegelian Dialectic of Reason.Bending to the dominant power, neoliberals accept(economic) necessity. The only difficulty is that noone knows which trends will achieve dominance inthe complicated becoming of future events.Consequently, cynicism-despite its apparentinevitability-is weak, as a position. No oneknows what will happen next. Unpredictableevents cannot be reduced to logical necessity.Irony and ZynismusSloterdijk is not alone in his conflation of masscynicism and irony. As h e writes in Critique:"From the very bottom, from the declassed urbanintelligentsia, and from the very top, from thesummits of statesmanly consciousness, signalspenetrate serious thinking, signals that provideevidence of a radical, ironic treatment (Ironizimmg)of ethics and of social conventions, as if universallaws existed only for the stupid, while the fatallyclever smile plays on the lips of those in the know."(Siorerdijk 1988, 4). Of course irony-like sarcasm, its more aggres­Sive form-can be an expression of cynicism. Butirony and cynicism should not be conflated. Ironycan be a linguistic tool for rationalizing cynicalbehavior. Both irony and cynicism imply a dissociationof language and behavior from consciousness:what you say is not what you think. But this dissociationtakes different turns in irony and cynicism.Vladimir Jankelevitch defines cynicism in thefollowing way in his book Irony: "(C]ynicism isoften deceived moralism, and an extreme form ofirony .. . " Gankelevitch 1936, 23) Cynicism, heimplies, is a learned form of irony, used for thepleasure of shocking the philistines.Cynicism is the philosophy of exaggeration(surenchere): as Jankelevitch writes, "irony afterSocrates tends to be exaggeration of moral radicalism.. . " Cynicism is deceived moralism, a judgmentof behavior that depends on a fixed systemof (moral) values. Dialectical materialism, thephilosophy of the past century, implied a form ofmoralism: anything (progress, socialism, etc.) thatmoves in the direction of history is good, whateveropposes the movement of history is bad. Post-'68cynicism results from a painful awakening. Sincethe truth has not been fulfilled, we'll align ourselveswith the untruth. And this is where ironyand cynicism differ. Ironic discourse never presupposesthe existence of a truth that will be fulfilled164 I Tne Upnsu1g: On Pvetry e.nd Ftnar.cePoetry and Ftnance / 165

or realized. Irony implies the infinite process ofinterpretation, whereas cynicism results from a(lost) faith. The cynic has lost his or her faith; theironist never had a faith to begin. In Jankelevitch'swords: "[I]rony is never disenchanted for the goodreason that irony has refused to be enchanted."(Jankelevitch 1936, 24)And yet, irony and cynicism both start with asuspension of disbelief in both the moral content oftruth, and morality's true content. Both cynics andironists understand that the True and the Good donot exist in God's mind or in History, and thathuman behavior isn't based upon respect for anylaw. In Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, Deleuzesays this of irony and the law: "Irony is still in theprocess or movement which bypasses the law as amerely secondary power and aims at transcending ittoward a higher principle." (Deleuze 1989, 86)Neither irony nor cynicism believe in the truefoundation of law. But the cynical person bendsto the law while mocking its false and pretentiousvalues, while the ironic person escapes thelaw altogether, creating a linguistic space wherelaw has no effectiveness. The cynic wants to be onthe side of power, even though he doesn't believe inits righteousness. T he ironist simply refuses thegame, recreating the world on the basis of languagethat is incongruent with reality. Whereas masscynicism (zynismus) has to do with aggression, bothsuffered and inflicted, irony is based upon sympathy.While cynical behavior pivots upon a false relationwith interlocutors, irony involves a shared suspensionof reality. The use of irony implies a sharedsense of assumptions and implications betweenoneself and one's listeners. Irony cannot be conflatedwith lying. As Jankelevitch writes:Lying is a state of war, and irony is a state ofpeace. T he liar is not in agreement with thecheated. The gullible consciousness is late in relationwith the lying consciousness, which is trying tomaintain its advantage. Irony, instead, is creditingthe interlocutor of sagacity and treats him/her asa true parrner of true d ialogue. Irony incitesintellection, and is calling a fraternal echo ofunderstanding. Oankelevitch 1936, 24)The conflation between power and the incessantmovement of historical events toward the goodthat defined Marxist thought was sundered. Herethe fork between irony and cynicism opens.Irony suspends the semantic value of the signifierto freely choose among a thousand possibleinterpretations. Ironic interpretations of eventspresuppose a common understanding betweenspeakers and listeners; a sympathy among thosewho, engaged in the ironic act, arrive at a commonautonomy from the dictatorship of the signified.166 / The Upris1ng: On P0Bt1y and F1nancePoetry and Finance I 167

TISleepIn the '70s, while reading Deleuze and Guattari,the consciousness of the autonomous movementdiscovered that reality has no meaning: the meaningof reality has to be created by the movement itself.So the autonomous movement broke free of theidea that the ethical horizon is marked by historicalnecessity, and opened its mind to the ironic mood,which means singularization of ethical responsibilityand political choice. In this (postdialectical) space ofmoral indetermination, both linguistic enunciationand political action are devoid of any ontologicalfoundation.The will of power and research of the good,which were linked in the framework of historicalideology, are now diverging. Here the fork of ironyand cynicism opens.Irony suspends the semantic value of the signifierand chooses freely among a thousand possibleinterpretations. The ironic interpretation implies andpresupposes a common ground of understandingamong the interlocutors, a sympathy among thosewho are involved in the ironic act, and a commonautonomy from the dictatorship of the signified.Cynicism starts from the same suspension, butis a slavish modulation of irony: irony at the serviceof power. While irony does not postulate theexistence of any reality, cynicism postulates theinescapable realicy of power, particularly the powerof the economy.Irony is an opening of a game of infinite possibilities;cynicism is a dissociation of ethics andpossibilicy. The cynical mood starts from the ideathat ethical action has no possibilicy of succeeding.The ironist sleeps happily because nothing canawake her from her dreams. The cynicist sleeps alight sleep, he dreams nightmares, and he gets upas soon as power calls him.168 1 The Uprising: On Pcetry and Finance

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