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The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance
The Uprising is an Autonomist manifesto for today's precarious times, and a rallying cry in the face of the catastrophic and irreversible crisis that neoliberalism and the financial sphere have established over the globe. In his newest book, Franco "Bifo" Berardi argues that the notion of economic recovery is complete mythology. The coming years will inevitably see new surges of protest and violence, but the old models of resistance no longer apply. Society can either stick with the prescriptions and "rescues" that the economic and financial sectors have demanded at the expense of social happiness, culture, and the public good; or it can formulate an alternative. For Berardi, this alternative lies in understanding the current crisis as something more fundamental than an economic crisis: it is a crisis of the social imagination, and demands a new language by which to address it.
This is a manifesto against the idea of growth, and against the concept of debt, the financial sector's two primary linguistic means of manipulating society. It is a call for exhaustion, and for resistance to the cult of energy on which today's economic free-floating market depends. To this end, Berardi introduces an unexpected linguistic political weapon--poetry: poetry as the insolvency of language, as the sensuous birth of meaning and desire, as that which cannot be reduced to information and exchanged like currency. If the protests now stirring about the world are to take shape and direction, then the revolution will be neither peaceful nor violent--it will be linguistic, or will not be at all.
This is a manifesto against the idea of growth, and against the concept of debt, the financial sector's two primary linguistic means of manipulating society. It is a call for exhaustion, and for resistance to the cult of energy on which today's economic free-floating market depends. To this end, Berardi introduces an unexpected linguistic political weapon--poetry: poetry as the insolvency of language, as the sensuous birth of meaning and desire, as that which cannot be reduced to information and exchanged like currency. If the protests now stirring about the world are to take shape and direction, then the revolution will be neither peaceful nor violent--it will be linguistic, or will not be at all.
176 pages, Paperback
First published November 2, 2012
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1288 people want to read
About the author
Franco "Bifo" Berardi
128 books461 followersFranco "Bifo" Berardi (born 2 November 1948 in Bologna, Italy) is an Italian Marxist theorist and activist in the autonomist tradition, whose work mainly focuses on the role of the media and information technology within post-industrial capitalism. Berardi has written over two dozen published books, as well as a more extensive number of essays and speeches.
Unlike orthodox Marxists, Berardi's autonomist theories draw on psychoanalysis, schizoanalysis and communication theory to show how subjectivity and desire are bound up with the functioning of the capitalism system, rather than portraying events such as the financial crisis of 2008 merely as an example of the inherently contradictory logic of capitalist accumulation. Thus, he argues against privileging labour in critique and says that "the solution to the economic difficulty of the situation cannot be solved with economic means: the solution is not economic." Human emotions and embodied communication becomes increasingly central to the production and consumption patterns that sustain capital flows in post-industrial society, and as such Berardi uses the concepts of "cognitariat" and "info labour" to analyze this psycho-social process. Among Berardi's other concerns are cultural representations and expectations about the future — from proto-Fascist Futurism to post-modern cyberpunk (1993). This represents a greater concern with ideas and cultural expectations than the determinist-materialist expression of a Marxism which is often confined to purely economic or systemic analysis.
(via Wikipedia)
Unlike orthodox Marxists, Berardi's autonomist theories draw on psychoanalysis, schizoanalysis and communication theory to show how subjectivity and desire are bound up with the functioning of the capitalism system, rather than portraying events such as the financial crisis of 2008 merely as an example of the inherently contradictory logic of capitalist accumulation. Thus, he argues against privileging labour in critique and says that "the solution to the economic difficulty of the situation cannot be solved with economic means: the solution is not economic." Human emotions and embodied communication becomes increasingly central to the production and consumption patterns that sustain capital flows in post-industrial society, and as such Berardi uses the concepts of "cognitariat" and "info labour" to analyze this psycho-social process. Among Berardi's other concerns are cultural representations and expectations about the future — from proto-Fascist Futurism to post-modern cyberpunk (1993). This represents a greater concern with ideas and cultural expectations than the determinist-materialist expression of a Marxism which is often confined to purely economic or systemic analysis.
(via Wikipedia)
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May 10, 2016
Everything is crumbling---it's crystal clear.
Read a certain wedge of this at a Bernie Sanders rally in Louisville. The candidate did not inspire me that night. My wife and I had already voted for him that morning. The ideas that Berardi tosses about in this text felt likewise inert. I recognize the idea that theory wants to be sexy, to stir with a poetic flourish. That said, I find the idea that the youth of the West have been stripped of possibility, of a Future -- well, that is just fatuous. This limiting condition or situation has to be situated against the Possibility of the Promise -- the ideological crux of Left or Right is a field where actualization can occur. Summarizing, if anyone has been robbed, they had to have beforehand, in this situation the "having" denotes possibility -- whether that be entrepreneurial or emancipatory. Can serio-capitalism strip such away from the human condition?
Now the glory of the future is over. We no longer trust the future, as the futurists--and the moderns, in general--did.
The arguments were salvaged in the concluding chapters, a point where Benjamin's Mystical Violence is flirted with and just as defiantly Sloterdijk's Kynicism is soundly rejected in favor of the Ironist's pose. A social movement, at the end of the day, should use irony as semiotic insolvency, as a mechanism of disentangling language, behavior, and action from the limits of the symbolic debt.
Read a certain wedge of this at a Bernie Sanders rally in Louisville. The candidate did not inspire me that night. My wife and I had already voted for him that morning. The ideas that Berardi tosses about in this text felt likewise inert. I recognize the idea that theory wants to be sexy, to stir with a poetic flourish. That said, I find the idea that the youth of the West have been stripped of possibility, of a Future -- well, that is just fatuous. This limiting condition or situation has to be situated against the Possibility of the Promise -- the ideological crux of Left or Right is a field where actualization can occur. Summarizing, if anyone has been robbed, they had to have beforehand, in this situation the "having" denotes possibility -- whether that be entrepreneurial or emancipatory. Can serio-capitalism strip such away from the human condition?
Now the glory of the future is over. We no longer trust the future, as the futurists--and the moderns, in general--did.
The arguments were salvaged in the concluding chapters, a point where Benjamin's Mystical Violence is flirted with and just as defiantly Sloterdijk's Kynicism is soundly rejected in favor of the Ironist's pose. A social movement, at the end of the day, should use irony as semiotic insolvency, as a mechanism of disentangling language, behavior, and action from the limits of the symbolic debt.
Read
January 29, 2021could not finish this one but im marking it as finisher bcs whatever i did my time, some interesting stuff about the EU but god i find the way he writes insufferable
July 26, 2016
One of the most difficult challenges the left has had to grapple with as finance capital has gained its foothold and then descended into crisis is that many of our key analytical concepts have proved wanting. Perhaps the most difficult of these challenges has been that posed by ‘value’ – how, in the world of finance capital, is it made and how does it relate to the material conditions of life? The labour theory of value, the basis of conventional left including Marxist approaches to value holds that the value of a good, of an economic product, is based in the labour time that went into its production – a widget takes X-hours to produce, so value added by its production (the conversion of raw materials into the widget) is the cost of X-hours average labour; in the conventional Marxist approach, capitalist wealth production comes about when the good is sold for more than the cost of its production – and by this means the capitalist extracts more (surplus) value than workers add through their labour power. The problem for the left is that finance capitalism doesn’t work that way – it doesn’t produce stuff/material goods, but produces more finance; the abstract thing that is money interacts with other abstract money to produce more wealth; industrial capitalism produces value (abstracted as money/profit) from the abstract labour of workers; finance capital produces value from itself, from the circulation of money isolated from the material world of labour and stuff.
This problem of immaterial value production is not new (the challenges posed by finance capital can be seen, for instance, in Marxist analyses such as Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917) and The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899) as well as left-liberal work from the same era, the first two decades of the 20th century, such as Hobson’s Imperialism (1904), which itself had a deep influence on Lenin), but in the current political conjuncture it takes on a hue because of the emergence of what some analysts, including Berardi, call semio-capitalism – a capitalism whose principle product is signs. In this case, semio-capitalism acts like industrial capitalism – things are produced by workers’ labour – but like finance capitalism these things are immaterial (of course, there is still a whole bunch of stuff being made – our clothes, our food, our cars & phones – to carry the signification semio-capitalism requires, but there is also a whole bunch of immaterial stuff being produced – ideas and the like). The problem with semio-capitalism is the there is no abstract ‘average labour time’ for the production of a sign, unlike clothes, food, cars & phones. As a result, we’ve seen a profound change between labour and capital and a generalisation of labour precarity, although for different reasons in industrial capitalism making our stuff and semio-capitalism making our signs; there is sharp insight to this conjunction in Andrea Fumagalli and Sandro Mezzadra’s collection Crisis in the Global Economy: Financial Markets, Social Struggles and New Political Scenarios .
The current crisis brings together a crisis of financial capitalism with its very real effects and the precarity of semio-capitalism’s workers to produce the uprising we are seeing against the business-as-usual neo-liberal world that is events as diverse as Occupy, the rebellions in Rio, the siege of Gezi Square, the ‘Arab Spring’ and elsewhere. Berardi, in this short and provocative set of essays, brings these factors together in an effort to make sense of the responses to the crisis as well as theorise this conjunction of crises in industrial, financial and semio-capitalisms. I’m not sure that it works as well as it could, but then that is often the case with early analyses – the essays were written in 2011 as the uprising was in its early days and the European neo-liberal response still finding its feet. At the core of his exploration of this problem is a paradox (noted also by others) that “capitalism has never been so close to its final collapse [that was optimistic] but social solidarity has never been so far from our daily experience” (p59); this is the effect of Thatcher’s and other neo-liberal’s proclamation that there is no such thing as society.
Alongside this problem of social relations, Berardi identifies two new aspects of the current capitalist condition that we need to comprehend. The convention left approach, identified by Marx, is the abstraction-in-capitalism of value from usefulness and productive labour from concrete human activity (quite of lot of Capital explains this). His case is that the current capitalist conjuncture relies on two further layers of abstraction where production is not based in the world of bodies and physical manipulation of stuff but in “interoperativity between informational machines” (p104) so that information replaces things. The third layer of abstraction is the generalisation of the one noted above – where the process of value creation no longer passes through use value but merely the circulation of money.
This is where the poetry comes in – as abstract, excessive language poetry provides a metaphor to discuss the abstractions of financial and semio-capitalisms. But it also provides a way into the critical comprehension of sensibility that semio-capitalism turns on and therefore the language to critique the capitalisation of language. This takes Berardi into a discussion of Wittgenstein but more importantly of Sloterdijk’s work on cynicism and irony, leading to an argument that mass cynicism (as opposed to Platonic cynicism) is complicit with Power whereas irony rejects the meanings imposed by Power and therefore opens up possibilities. The problem here is that the discussion of poetry is the least well developed element of the argument – which is not surprising; many on the left, and Berardi seems no different from many of the rest of us in this regard, are much better at analysis than we are at developing a path out of the current condition.
This text, then, is of its time; the opening chapter is a sharp autonomist-inspired analysis of the European uprising in late 2011. The body of the text – the second two essays – insightful analyses of the semio-capitalism and its links to and connections with industrial and financial capitalism providing useful extensions of convention left political economy understandings of the emerging generalised condition of precarity. The final essay, the one on poetry, looks like the beginnings of an intriguing pathway to action, or at least the basis of a way to better understand how to develop that way out of the circumstances we find ourselves in. We should not write this off; it is designed as an intervention into on-going debates (the publishers, semiotext(e) even label this part of their ‘intervention series’) and should therefore be used as a way to sharpen our understandings and analyses, to frame our explorations of work in contemporary capitalism, to consider carefully the labour process of production in semio-capitalism and what that tells us about the politics of struggle (including who and what we’re struggling against as well as what we’re struggling for) in the new economic circumstances of increasingly widespread immaterial labour and the expansion of value without usefulness.
There are parts of this I’ll be drawn back to in my work, especially the third essay, and I look forward to Berardi’s on-going work to bring these ideas into more coherent whole; at present the ideas are more compelling than coherent.
This problem of immaterial value production is not new (the challenges posed by finance capital can be seen, for instance, in Marxist analyses such as Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917) and The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899) as well as left-liberal work from the same era, the first two decades of the 20th century, such as Hobson’s Imperialism (1904), which itself had a deep influence on Lenin), but in the current political conjuncture it takes on a hue because of the emergence of what some analysts, including Berardi, call semio-capitalism – a capitalism whose principle product is signs. In this case, semio-capitalism acts like industrial capitalism – things are produced by workers’ labour – but like finance capitalism these things are immaterial (of course, there is still a whole bunch of stuff being made – our clothes, our food, our cars & phones – to carry the signification semio-capitalism requires, but there is also a whole bunch of immaterial stuff being produced – ideas and the like). The problem with semio-capitalism is the there is no abstract ‘average labour time’ for the production of a sign, unlike clothes, food, cars & phones. As a result, we’ve seen a profound change between labour and capital and a generalisation of labour precarity, although for different reasons in industrial capitalism making our stuff and semio-capitalism making our signs; there is sharp insight to this conjunction in Andrea Fumagalli and Sandro Mezzadra’s collection Crisis in the Global Economy: Financial Markets, Social Struggles and New Political Scenarios .
The current crisis brings together a crisis of financial capitalism with its very real effects and the precarity of semio-capitalism’s workers to produce the uprising we are seeing against the business-as-usual neo-liberal world that is events as diverse as Occupy, the rebellions in Rio, the siege of Gezi Square, the ‘Arab Spring’ and elsewhere. Berardi, in this short and provocative set of essays, brings these factors together in an effort to make sense of the responses to the crisis as well as theorise this conjunction of crises in industrial, financial and semio-capitalisms. I’m not sure that it works as well as it could, but then that is often the case with early analyses – the essays were written in 2011 as the uprising was in its early days and the European neo-liberal response still finding its feet. At the core of his exploration of this problem is a paradox (noted also by others) that “capitalism has never been so close to its final collapse [that was optimistic] but social solidarity has never been so far from our daily experience” (p59); this is the effect of Thatcher’s and other neo-liberal’s proclamation that there is no such thing as society.
Alongside this problem of social relations, Berardi identifies two new aspects of the current capitalist condition that we need to comprehend. The convention left approach, identified by Marx, is the abstraction-in-capitalism of value from usefulness and productive labour from concrete human activity (quite of lot of Capital explains this). His case is that the current capitalist conjuncture relies on two further layers of abstraction where production is not based in the world of bodies and physical manipulation of stuff but in “interoperativity between informational machines” (p104) so that information replaces things. The third layer of abstraction is the generalisation of the one noted above – where the process of value creation no longer passes through use value but merely the circulation of money.
This is where the poetry comes in – as abstract, excessive language poetry provides a metaphor to discuss the abstractions of financial and semio-capitalisms. But it also provides a way into the critical comprehension of sensibility that semio-capitalism turns on and therefore the language to critique the capitalisation of language. This takes Berardi into a discussion of Wittgenstein but more importantly of Sloterdijk’s work on cynicism and irony, leading to an argument that mass cynicism (as opposed to Platonic cynicism) is complicit with Power whereas irony rejects the meanings imposed by Power and therefore opens up possibilities. The problem here is that the discussion of poetry is the least well developed element of the argument – which is not surprising; many on the left, and Berardi seems no different from many of the rest of us in this regard, are much better at analysis than we are at developing a path out of the current condition.
This text, then, is of its time; the opening chapter is a sharp autonomist-inspired analysis of the European uprising in late 2011. The body of the text – the second two essays – insightful analyses of the semio-capitalism and its links to and connections with industrial and financial capitalism providing useful extensions of convention left political economy understandings of the emerging generalised condition of precarity. The final essay, the one on poetry, looks like the beginnings of an intriguing pathway to action, or at least the basis of a way to better understand how to develop that way out of the circumstances we find ourselves in. We should not write this off; it is designed as an intervention into on-going debates (the publishers, semiotext(e) even label this part of their ‘intervention series’) and should therefore be used as a way to sharpen our understandings and analyses, to frame our explorations of work in contemporary capitalism, to consider carefully the labour process of production in semio-capitalism and what that tells us about the politics of struggle (including who and what we’re struggling against as well as what we’re struggling for) in the new economic circumstances of increasingly widespread immaterial labour and the expansion of value without usefulness.
There are parts of this I’ll be drawn back to in my work, especially the third essay, and I look forward to Berardi’s on-going work to bring these ideas into more coherent whole; at present the ideas are more compelling than coherent.
July 27, 2016
يهاجم بوضوح الاقتصاديين الى انهم لا يحاكون الواقع في نظرتهم ولا يعتمدون عليه بل أنهم يريدون جره لإتباع نظرياتهم والتي بدورها تدعم اتجاهات سياسية واجتماعية معينة ممدودين في ذلك كله عبر التقنية ، والتي بدورها حولت الواقع الى رموز ، اصبحت السلع المادية في حفرة من الفضاء الافتراضي وانقطع حبل التواصل المالي ، لتصبح صناعة المال عبر انتقال مالي بدون وجود لسلعة مادية تنتقل بالفعل ، هذا الوضع يشبه الرمزية الشعرية تلك التي تعطيك انطباع عن المعنى بدون ان توصلك به مباشرة ، الا أن الرمزية ليس لها دور في تجفيف اللغة بقدر ما للشكل الاقتصادي الماثل حيث أصبحت غارقة في الرمزية عبر التكنولوجيا التي اجترت اللغة بدورها الى حيز المعلومة الضيق ، وهكذا يضاف نقد بيراردي للتكنولوجيا الى نقد النيو ليبرالية ، و يضاف الى التشاؤم الماركسي بشأن المستقبل في ظل هذه الأوضاع
وفي شأن الأزمة الإقتصادية يعيد بيراردي نفس الكلام ، وأننا بعد تطور كبير و غنى مادي لم تشهده البشرية من قبل تمدد عبر مجهود أنساني جبار من كل العالم أو الكلمة التي تحلو له اللا أقليمي ( عبر التقنية والشبكة العالمية بالأساس ) ، تم تحويل تلك الثروة عبر هذا الفضاء الافتراضي من المجتمع الى قلة هم الاقتصاديون الرأسماليون ، إن ذلك كان ليكفي الجميع لو تم توزيعه بشكل جيد ، إننا لا زلنا نعاني وسنعاني من اثار هذه الدكتاتورية الإقتصادية
يقود المؤلف حجج أعمق بشأن اللغة و الإقتصاد والرابط الذي أقامه بينهما ، كانت قراءتها صعبة بعض الشئ وبالقدر نفسه تلخيصها هنا خصوصا تلك التي كان يقتبس فيها كثيرا من فلسفة غوتاري و دولوز ، لكن أقدم بعض الانطباعات العامة التي اقتبستها من كلامه ، تحدث بشأن التجريد الذي تم في كل العالم بعد الحداثة ونزول التقنية وخصوصا الدوت كوم :) أو الشبكة العنكبوتية وأداءها لدور تحوير المجهود والذي يستلزم صناعة القيمة بالنسبة للانسان الى الانسان الذي قتلت المنافسة فيه صناعة القيمة ، تحدث عن الزمن الذي ليس هو الفردي الذي نرى فيه امتدادنا الشخصي كما هو بتعبير برغسون ، بل الزمن الذي يضمنا جميعا ممهدا لاتهام البنوك بسرقته هي لم تسرق الحال الاني الذي نعيشه بل ايضا سرقت المستقبل بصناعة الدين ، تحدث عن سقوط العلاقات العامة وخلق المعنى والتي كانت مربوطة بالانتاج اما سطوة المنافسة و السعي نحو اللا محدود ممثلا بفلم الشبكة الإجتماعية والذي يسرد قصة انشاء الفيس بوك من قبل مارك زكربيرج ، تحدث عن تفتيت الزمن الى جزيئات و جعل الوقت من اجل العمل فقط ، تحدث عن فقدان المعنى في عصر المعلومة - المعنى الذي يحتاج زمنا للتكوين - الزمن الذي أخذته الرأسمالية في المنافسة والتي جعلت توفيت متطلبات الحياة الهم الأول بدلا من الحياة ذاتها ، التي قللت الأجور وزادت ساعة العمل و قللت من العمال و زادت من زمن التعاقد ايهاما وجعلت الشباب يرضى بأي شئ لقلة الفرص ، كتاب جميل ويستحق أن يقرأ أكثر من مرة
وفي شأن الأزمة الإقتصادية يعيد بيراردي نفس الكلام ، وأننا بعد تطور كبير و غنى مادي لم تشهده البشرية من قبل تمدد عبر مجهود أنساني جبار من كل العالم أو الكلمة التي تحلو له اللا أقليمي ( عبر التقنية والشبكة العالمية بالأساس ) ، تم تحويل تلك الثروة عبر هذا الفضاء الافتراضي من المجتمع الى قلة هم الاقتصاديون الرأسماليون ، إن ذلك كان ليكفي الجميع لو تم توزيعه بشكل جيد ، إننا لا زلنا نعاني وسنعاني من اثار هذه الدكتاتورية الإقتصادية
يقود المؤلف حجج أعمق بشأن اللغة و الإقتصاد والرابط الذي أقامه بينهما ، كانت قراءتها صعبة بعض الشئ وبالقدر نفسه تلخيصها هنا خصوصا تلك التي كان يقتبس فيها كثيرا من فلسفة غوتاري و دولوز ، لكن أقدم بعض الانطباعات العامة التي اقتبستها من كلامه ، تحدث بشأن التجريد الذي تم في كل العالم بعد الحداثة ونزول التقنية وخصوصا الدوت كوم :) أو الشبكة العنكبوتية وأداءها لدور تحوير المجهود والذي يستلزم صناعة القيمة بالنسبة للانسان الى الانسان الذي قتلت المنافسة فيه صناعة القيمة ، تحدث عن الزمن الذي ليس هو الفردي الذي نرى فيه امتدادنا الشخصي كما هو بتعبير برغسون ، بل الزمن الذي يضمنا جميعا ممهدا لاتهام البنوك بسرقته هي لم تسرق الحال الاني الذي نعيشه بل ايضا سرقت المستقبل بصناعة الدين ، تحدث عن سقوط العلاقات العامة وخلق المعنى والتي كانت مربوطة بالانتاج اما سطوة المنافسة و السعي نحو اللا محدود ممثلا بفلم الشبكة الإجتماعية والذي يسرد قصة انشاء الفيس بوك من قبل مارك زكربيرج ، تحدث عن تفتيت الزمن الى جزيئات و جعل الوقت من اجل العمل فقط ، تحدث عن فقدان المعنى في عصر المعلومة - المعنى الذي يحتاج زمنا للتكوين - الزمن الذي أخذته الرأسمالية في المنافسة والتي جعلت توفيت متطلبات الحياة الهم الأول بدلا من الحياة ذاتها ، التي قللت الأجور وزادت ساعة العمل و قللت من العمال و زادت من زمن التعاقد ايهاما وجعلت الشباب يرضى بأي شئ لقلة الفرص ، كتاب جميل ويستحق أن يقرأ أكثر من مرة
September 20, 2020
"My impression is this: in conditions of info-acceleration and hypercomplexity, as the conscious and rational will becomes unable to check and to adjust the trends, the trends themselves become self-reinforcing up to the point of final collapse. Look at the vicious circle: right-wing electoral victories and dictatorships of ignorance" (12).
"In conditions of social hypercomplexity, human beings tend to act as a swarm. When the infosphere is too dense and too fast for a conscious elaboration of information, people tend to conform to shared behavior. In a letter to John Seabrook, Bill Gates wrote 'the digital revolution is all about facilitation--creating the tools to make things easy.' In a broader sense, we may say that in the digital age, power is all about making things easy" (15).
"In a swarm it is not impossible to say 'no.' It's irrelevant. You can express your refusal, your rebellion and your nonalignment, but this is not going to change the direction of the swarm, nor is it going to affect the way in which the swarm's brain is elaborating information" (16).
"In the world of financial capitalism, accumulation no longer passes through the production of goods, but goes straight to its monetary goal, extracting value from the pure circulation of money, from the virtualization of life and intelligence" (23-24).
"The techno-linguistic machine that is the financial web is acting as a living organism, and its mission is drying up the world" (26).
"Neoliberal ideology starts from the same emphasis on deregulation and the cult of freedom" (28).
"In neoliberal parlance, deregulation means liberation from the constraints generated by conscious will, but simultaneously submission to techno-linguistic automation" (29).
"In 1972, Richard Nixon did something that can be considered 'dereferentialization' in the realm of monetary economy. Breaking the Bretton Woods agreements, the American president said the dollar would have no reference to reality and that its value would henceforth be decided by an act of language, not by correspondence to a standard or to an economic referent.
Nixon's decision was the starting point of the financialization of the economy, based on the emancipation of the financial dynamic from any conventional standard and from any economic reality" (30).
"Systematic impoverishment is imposed on social life by the logic of debt repayment. What is debt actually? Is it an inescapable metaphysical necessity? No. Debt is an act of language, a promise. The transformation of debt into an absolute necessity is an effect of the religion of neoliberalism, which is leading the contemporary world toward barbarism and social devastation" (31).
"...as deregulated predatory capitalism is destroying the future of the planet and of social life, poetry is going to play a new game: the game of reactivating the social body" (36).
"Society has been broken up, rendered fragile and fragmented by thirty years of perpetual precarization, uncontrolled and rampant competition, and psychic poisoning produced and controlled by the 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 racism and self-defeating violence. This is the unfortunate effect of the long process of desolidarization which neoliberalism and the criminal political left have subjected society to for decades through their incessant proliferation and fragmentation of work" (49).
"Peaceful demonstrations are effective in the frame of democracy, but democracy is over now that techno-financial automatisms have taken the place of political decisions [...] But violence, too, is unfit to change the course of things. Burning a bank is totally useless, as financial power is not in the physical buildings, but in the abstract connections between numbers, algorithms, and information [...] Following the example of Wikileaks, we must organize a long-lasting process of dismantling and rewriting the techno-linguistic automatons enslaving all of us" (53-54).
"A new concept is emerging from the fog of the present situation: the right to insolvency: we're not going to pay the debt" (55).
"But the present situation is paradoxical--simultaneously exciting and despairing. Capitalism has never been so close to it's final collapse, but social solidarity has never been so far from our daily experience. We must start from this paradox in order to build a postpolitical and postrevolutionary process of disentangling the possible from the existent" (59).
"The financial dogma states the following: if we want to keep participating in the game played in the banks and stock markets, we must forfeit a quiet, pleasant life. We must forfeit civilization. But why should we accept this exchange?" (63).
"The prospect open to us is not a revolution. The concept of revolution no longer corresponds to anything, because it entails an exaggerated notion of political will over the complexity of contemporary society. Our prospect is a paradigmatic shift: to a new paradigm that is not centered on product, growth, profit, and accumulation, but on the full unfolding of the power of collective intelligence" (64).
"Organic limits have been denied, forgotten. The organic body of the Earth, and the entropy inherent to human life, has been despised, concealed, and segregated" (66).
"Denial of age and of time is the ultimate delirium of the global class" (67).
"The question that remains is: who says that economic competition is the only standard and political criterion of choice?" (70).
"Finance is an effect of the virtualization of reality, acting on the psycho-cognitive sphere of the economy. But at the same time, finance is an effect of the deterritorialization of wealth. It's not easy to identify financial capitalists as persons. Finance is not the monetary translation of a certain amount of physical goods; it is, rather, an effect of language [...] That is why, when you go looking for the financial class, you cannot locate someone to talk to, or negotiate with, or an enemy to fight against " (79).
"Finance seems inhuman and pitiless because it is not human and therefore has no pity" (80).
"...energy is fading because competition is stupid in the age of the general intellect. The general intellect is not based on juvenile impetus and male aggressivity--on fighting, winning, and appropriation. It is based on cooperation and sharing" (81).
"You cannot find truth in financial capitalism, because the essential tool of financial capitalism is this: truth has disappeared, dissolved. It's no longer there. There is no more truth, only an exchange of signs, only a deterritorialization of meaning" (85).
"What Sid Vicious and the other Sex Pistols screamed and declared in 1977 was the final premonition of the end of modern times, the end of industrial capitalism, and the beginning of a new age, which is an age of total violence: financial globalization, deregulation, total competition, infinite war" (94).
"Increasing productivity in the sphere of semio-capitalism is essentially a problem of accelerating the infosphere. In the sphere of semio-capital, if you want to increase productivity, what you have to do is accelerate the infosphere, the environment where information races toward the brain.
What happens then to our brain--to the social brain? Cognition takes time. Think of what attention is. Attention is the activation of physical reactions in the brain, and also of emotional, affective reactions. Attention cannot be infinitely accelerated" (97).
"more information means less meaning [...] So the acceleration of the info-flow implies an elimination of meaning" (105).
"Mental disorders and psychopathologies are symptoms of this dual process of virtual derealization and acceleration" (106).
"Work and self-realization have to merge in the new economic vision: individuals have to become free agents. There is no longer a distinction between life time and work time: all of your time has to be devoted to earning money, as money has taken the place of desire" (111).
"This digital-financial hyperabstraction is liquidating both the living body of the planet and the social body" (111-112).
"...the net actually is an ever-expanding space, but the infinity of mental energy was an illusion" (114).
"The exhaustibility of psychic resources is the intrinsic limit of the cybersphere" (114).
"Sensibility is the ability of the human being to communicate what cannot be said in words" (121).
"In order to efficiently interact with the connective environment, the conscious and sensitive organism starts to suppress to a certain degree what we call sensibility. This is, in my opinion, the core of the cognitive reformatting that is underway
Sensibility--i.e. the ability to interpret and understand what cannot be expressed in verbal or digital signs can be useless and also dangerous in an integrated system of connective nature. Sensibility slows interpretation procedures, making decodification aleatory, ambiguous, and uncertain, and thus reducing the competitive efficiency of the semiotic agent" (126-127).
"Disempathy is the consequence of this disharmonization of social communication" (129).
"The organization of violent actions by the anti-capitalist movement would not be smart, as violence is a pathological demonstration of impotence when power is protected by armies of professional killers" (132).
"It is useless to preach a sermon to those who can only express their revolt in a violent way. The medic does not judge, but heals, and the task of the movement is to act as a medic, not as a judge.
What we should be able to communicate to the rioters, the looters, the black bloc, and the cassseurs is a truth that we have to build together and to spread: that a collective mantra chanted by millions of people will tear down the walls of Jericho much better than a pickaxe or bomb" (133).
"Similarly, in the sphere of communication, language is traded and valued as something that is performed. Effectiveness, not truth value, is the rule of language in the sphere of communication. Pragmatics, not hermeneutics, is the methodology for understanding social communication, particularly in the age of new media" (138).
"The new alienation is based on this separation, on the virtualization of social relations. The new alienation takes the form of psychic suffering, panic, depression, and a suicidal tide" (141).
"When general intellect will be able to reconstitute its social and erotic body, capitalist rule will become obsolete" (142).
"Wikileaks has displayed the infinite potency of the collective networked intelligence. The unleashing of the creative force of the general intellect is the momentous event that Julian Assange has been able to orchestrate. I don't think that we really have to know the contents of all those cables and emails that Wikileaks disclosed. Actually, we already knew that diplomats are paid to lie, and that soldiers are paid for killing civilians" (142).
"In the current conditions of capitalist competition, acceleration is the trigger for panic, and panic is the premise to depression. Singularity is forgotten, erased, and cancelled in the erotic domain of semio-capitalism. The singularity of the voice and the singularity of words are subjected to the homogenizationof exchange and valorization " (146).
"Poetry is language's excess: poetry is what in language cannot be reduced to information, and is not exchangeable, but gives way to a new common ground of understanding, of shared meaning: the creation of a new world" (146).
"Changing the order of expectations is one of the main social transformations that a movement can produce: this change implies a cultural transformation but also a change in sensitivity, in the opening of the organism to the world and to others" (151).
"The ambiguity of the info-rhizomatic territory is crystal clear: info-technology is standardizing subjectivity and language, inscribing techno-linguistic interfaces which automize enunciation" (153).
"Digital financial capitalism has created a closed reality which cannot be overcome with the techniques of politics, of conscious organized voluntary action, and of government
Only an act of language can give us the ability to see and to create a new human condition, where we now see only barbarism and violence.
Only an act of language escaping the technical automatisms of financial capitalism will make possible the emergence of a new life form. The new form of life will be the social and instinctual body that the general intellect is deprived of inside the present condition of the financial dictatorship" (157).
"Irony is an opening of a game of infinite possibilities: cynicism is a dissociation of ethics and possibility. The cynical mood starts from the idea that ethical action has no possibility of succeeding.
The ironist sleeps happily because nothing can awake her from her dreams. The cynicist sleeps a light sleep, he dreams nightmares, and he gets up as soon as power calls him" (169).
"In conditions of social hypercomplexity, human beings tend to act as a swarm. When the infosphere is too dense and too fast for a conscious elaboration of information, people tend to conform to shared behavior. In a letter to John Seabrook, Bill Gates wrote 'the digital revolution is all about facilitation--creating the tools to make things easy.' In a broader sense, we may say that in the digital age, power is all about making things easy" (15).
"In a swarm it is not impossible to say 'no.' It's irrelevant. You can express your refusal, your rebellion and your nonalignment, but this is not going to change the direction of the swarm, nor is it going to affect the way in which the swarm's brain is elaborating information" (16).
"In the world of financial capitalism, accumulation no longer passes through the production of goods, but goes straight to its monetary goal, extracting value from the pure circulation of money, from the virtualization of life and intelligence" (23-24).
"The techno-linguistic machine that is the financial web is acting as a living organism, and its mission is drying up the world" (26).
"Neoliberal ideology starts from the same emphasis on deregulation and the cult of freedom" (28).
"In neoliberal parlance, deregulation means liberation from the constraints generated by conscious will, but simultaneously submission to techno-linguistic automation" (29).
"In 1972, Richard Nixon did something that can be considered 'dereferentialization' in the realm of monetary economy. Breaking the Bretton Woods agreements, the American president said the dollar would have no reference to reality and that its value would henceforth be decided by an act of language, not by correspondence to a standard or to an economic referent.
Nixon's decision was the starting point of the financialization of the economy, based on the emancipation of the financial dynamic from any conventional standard and from any economic reality" (30).
"Systematic impoverishment is imposed on social life by the logic of debt repayment. What is debt actually? Is it an inescapable metaphysical necessity? No. Debt is an act of language, a promise. The transformation of debt into an absolute necessity is an effect of the religion of neoliberalism, which is leading the contemporary world toward barbarism and social devastation" (31).
"...as deregulated predatory capitalism is destroying the future of the planet and of social life, poetry is going to play a new game: the game of reactivating the social body" (36).
"Society has been broken up, rendered fragile and fragmented by thirty years of perpetual precarization, uncontrolled and rampant competition, and psychic poisoning produced and controlled by the 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 racism and self-defeating violence. This is the unfortunate effect of the long process of desolidarization which neoliberalism and the criminal political left have subjected society to for decades through their incessant proliferation and fragmentation of work" (49).
"Peaceful demonstrations are effective in the frame of democracy, but democracy is over now that techno-financial automatisms have taken the place of political decisions [...] But violence, too, is unfit to change the course of things. Burning a bank is totally useless, as financial power is not in the physical buildings, but in the abstract connections between numbers, algorithms, and information [...] Following the example of Wikileaks, we must organize a long-lasting process of dismantling and rewriting the techno-linguistic automatons enslaving all of us" (53-54).
"A new concept is emerging from the fog of the present situation: the right to insolvency: we're not going to pay the debt" (55).
"But the present situation is paradoxical--simultaneously exciting and despairing. Capitalism has never been so close to it's final collapse, but social solidarity has never been so far from our daily experience. We must start from this paradox in order to build a postpolitical and postrevolutionary process of disentangling the possible from the existent" (59).
"The financial dogma states the following: if we want to keep participating in the game played in the banks and stock markets, we must forfeit a quiet, pleasant life. We must forfeit civilization. But why should we accept this exchange?" (63).
"The prospect open to us is not a revolution. The concept of revolution no longer corresponds to anything, because it entails an exaggerated notion of political will over the complexity of contemporary society. Our prospect is a paradigmatic shift: to a new paradigm that is not centered on product, growth, profit, and accumulation, but on the full unfolding of the power of collective intelligence" (64).
"Organic limits have been denied, forgotten. The organic body of the Earth, and the entropy inherent to human life, has been despised, concealed, and segregated" (66).
"Denial of age and of time is the ultimate delirium of the global class" (67).
"The question that remains is: who says that economic competition is the only standard and political criterion of choice?" (70).
"Finance is an effect of the virtualization of reality, acting on the psycho-cognitive sphere of the economy. But at the same time, finance is an effect of the deterritorialization of wealth. It's not easy to identify financial capitalists as persons. Finance is not the monetary translation of a certain amount of physical goods; it is, rather, an effect of language [...] That is why, when you go looking for the financial class, you cannot locate someone to talk to, or negotiate with, or an enemy to fight against " (79).
"Finance seems inhuman and pitiless because it is not human and therefore has no pity" (80).
"...energy is fading because competition is stupid in the age of the general intellect. The general intellect is not based on juvenile impetus and male aggressivity--on fighting, winning, and appropriation. It is based on cooperation and sharing" (81).
"You cannot find truth in financial capitalism, because the essential tool of financial capitalism is this: truth has disappeared, dissolved. It's no longer there. There is no more truth, only an exchange of signs, only a deterritorialization of meaning" (85).
"What Sid Vicious and the other Sex Pistols screamed and declared in 1977 was the final premonition of the end of modern times, the end of industrial capitalism, and the beginning of a new age, which is an age of total violence: financial globalization, deregulation, total competition, infinite war" (94).
"Increasing productivity in the sphere of semio-capitalism is essentially a problem of accelerating the infosphere. In the sphere of semio-capital, if you want to increase productivity, what you have to do is accelerate the infosphere, the environment where information races toward the brain.
What happens then to our brain--to the social brain? Cognition takes time. Think of what attention is. Attention is the activation of physical reactions in the brain, and also of emotional, affective reactions. Attention cannot be infinitely accelerated" (97).
"more information means less meaning [...] So the acceleration of the info-flow implies an elimination of meaning" (105).
"Mental disorders and psychopathologies are symptoms of this dual process of virtual derealization and acceleration" (106).
"Work and self-realization have to merge in the new economic vision: individuals have to become free agents. There is no longer a distinction between life time and work time: all of your time has to be devoted to earning money, as money has taken the place of desire" (111).
"This digital-financial hyperabstraction is liquidating both the living body of the planet and the social body" (111-112).
"...the net actually is an ever-expanding space, but the infinity of mental energy was an illusion" (114).
"The exhaustibility of psychic resources is the intrinsic limit of the cybersphere" (114).
"Sensibility is the ability of the human being to communicate what cannot be said in words" (121).
"In order to efficiently interact with the connective environment, the conscious and sensitive organism starts to suppress to a certain degree what we call sensibility. This is, in my opinion, the core of the cognitive reformatting that is underway
Sensibility--i.e. the ability to interpret and understand what cannot be expressed in verbal or digital signs can be useless and also dangerous in an integrated system of connective nature. Sensibility slows interpretation procedures, making decodification aleatory, ambiguous, and uncertain, and thus reducing the competitive efficiency of the semiotic agent" (126-127).
"Disempathy is the consequence of this disharmonization of social communication" (129).
"The organization of violent actions by the anti-capitalist movement would not be smart, as violence is a pathological demonstration of impotence when power is protected by armies of professional killers" (132).
"It is useless to preach a sermon to those who can only express their revolt in a violent way. The medic does not judge, but heals, and the task of the movement is to act as a medic, not as a judge.
What we should be able to communicate to the rioters, the looters, the black bloc, and the cassseurs is a truth that we have to build together and to spread: that a collective mantra chanted by millions of people will tear down the walls of Jericho much better than a pickaxe or bomb" (133).
"Similarly, in the sphere of communication, language is traded and valued as something that is performed. Effectiveness, not truth value, is the rule of language in the sphere of communication. Pragmatics, not hermeneutics, is the methodology for understanding social communication, particularly in the age of new media" (138).
"The new alienation is based on this separation, on the virtualization of social relations. The new alienation takes the form of psychic suffering, panic, depression, and a suicidal tide" (141).
"When general intellect will be able to reconstitute its social and erotic body, capitalist rule will become obsolete" (142).
"Wikileaks has displayed the infinite potency of the collective networked intelligence. The unleashing of the creative force of the general intellect is the momentous event that Julian Assange has been able to orchestrate. I don't think that we really have to know the contents of all those cables and emails that Wikileaks disclosed. Actually, we already knew that diplomats are paid to lie, and that soldiers are paid for killing civilians" (142).
"In the current conditions of capitalist competition, acceleration is the trigger for panic, and panic is the premise to depression. Singularity is forgotten, erased, and cancelled in the erotic domain of semio-capitalism. The singularity of the voice and the singularity of words are subjected to the homogenizationof exchange and valorization " (146).
"Poetry is language's excess: poetry is what in language cannot be reduced to information, and is not exchangeable, but gives way to a new common ground of understanding, of shared meaning: the creation of a new world" (146).
"Changing the order of expectations is one of the main social transformations that a movement can produce: this change implies a cultural transformation but also a change in sensitivity, in the opening of the organism to the world and to others" (151).
"The ambiguity of the info-rhizomatic territory is crystal clear: info-technology is standardizing subjectivity and language, inscribing techno-linguistic interfaces which automize enunciation" (153).
"Digital financial capitalism has created a closed reality which cannot be overcome with the techniques of politics, of conscious organized voluntary action, and of government
Only an act of language can give us the ability to see and to create a new human condition, where we now see only barbarism and violence.
Only an act of language escaping the technical automatisms of financial capitalism will make possible the emergence of a new life form. The new form of life will be the social and instinctual body that the general intellect is deprived of inside the present condition of the financial dictatorship" (157).
"Irony is an opening of a game of infinite possibilities: cynicism is a dissociation of ethics and possibility. The cynical mood starts from the idea that ethical action has no possibility of succeeding.
The ironist sleeps happily because nothing can awake her from her dreams. The cynicist sleeps a light sleep, he dreams nightmares, and he gets up as soon as power calls him" (169).
March 5, 2018
Berardi explores the state of the current financial capital system and the new methods of exploitation and abstraction that capital has adapted to and that have lead to a whole new wave of effects on the population at large. His book focuses on semiotics (the use of signs,symbol and communication to create meaning) in the context of an ever more immaterial forms of economic and political oppression and the ways in which we can answer the assault on our ''general intellect and social body '' and the way in which we can rebel against this.
As the world becomes more and more entangled in the mesh of financial capital (or of what David Harvey calls the ''state-financial nexus'') created by the aggressive and relentless assault of neo-liberalism through deregulation, privatization and debt we see a new wave of phenomena affecting people and shaping their lives. Abstractization of the essence from our economic and social activities(work from avitivity, usefulness from goods, time from sensousness etc) has lead to a disconnect in the way we go about our lives. It has used digitalization and virtualization (weather the stock market or social media) to achieve this, pushing the world that value inhabits into one that is immaterial and detached from reality or for that matter human desire. Berardi focuses on linkages and the the notion of semio-capital(how capital degrades meaning through semiotics), language has been hijacked and turned into a techno-linguistic intermediary, based on mathematical overrationalization and a language that does not connect to our human needs and wants.
The new world is one of hypercomplexitiy and hyperaccelaration, fueled by an ever more gigantic infosphere while economic life lies stiffly in the hands of a raging, profit hungry market that disregards any kinds of human emotion and sensibility while removing value from reality. We are assailed by a vast amount of information and as such our interactions are streamlined and simplified so as to be easier to understand, we are moulded more and more into a hive-mind or a swarm that acts as a mindless collective. Technology is used as a medium of control of the techo-linguistic system, Berardi affirms that future generations are beginning to be taught languages and words not by our human mothers, but by machines as we are ever more exposed and in proximity to them.
Berardi sees this assault as a next level of alienation in capitalism, if in the industrial period physical work was the one alienated, cognitive work has now become the focal point of exploitation and alienation and it is cognitive work that is degraded and made precarious this time round. He sees that the effects of a streamlined, mechanized world where our social communication and our ability to connect to one another, to solidarize and have empathy have numbed out and stomped out of focus. As this trend continues and as economics have moved into the virtual, immaterial world where value can be manipulated by speculators and where the sharpest tool of neoliberalism, debt, can wreak havoc. Using the example of the European countries afflicted by the debt crisis (Portugal, Greece, Ireland) he shows the absurdity of a people toiling away to pay of an invisible debt that they themselves have not accrued. Banks no longer hold value but our future monetized, the future of all the exploited people of IMF and ECB assaulted countries.
In accumulating value, financial capital is infinite, as it is not tied down by physical and material limitations if forecasts an infinity of accumulation. However, as we see this in the growing inequality of the world and the destruction of nature, this is potentially spelling disaster.
His solution, exploring the works of Deleuze, Guatarri and Baudrillard, is that of poetry, he sees poetry as the dimension of non-exchangability and infinity, that addresses our desires and creates a sense of autonomy and self-governance. The essence of this idea is to extract the fundamentals of how poetry functions and to apply in the construction of meaningful interactions with other people. The final goal being the reconstruction of the general intellect and the social body of people through communication and language that reflects more the world of humans than that of capital.
Furthermore he expands on the notion of irony(unconnected to cynicism) as a tool for resistance against this streamlined method of techno-linguistics. This last point being perhaps his works greatest shortcoming, using the postmodernist technique of irony. Although it is effective in revealing the truth of our connections, it is doomed to fail by nature of it's limitations, yes, it shows the absurdity of the world but it stops there and is devoid of any redeeming qualities.
As the world becomes more and more entangled in the mesh of financial capital (or of what David Harvey calls the ''state-financial nexus'') created by the aggressive and relentless assault of neo-liberalism through deregulation, privatization and debt we see a new wave of phenomena affecting people and shaping their lives. Abstractization of the essence from our economic and social activities(work from avitivity, usefulness from goods, time from sensousness etc) has lead to a disconnect in the way we go about our lives. It has used digitalization and virtualization (weather the stock market or social media) to achieve this, pushing the world that value inhabits into one that is immaterial and detached from reality or for that matter human desire. Berardi focuses on linkages and the the notion of semio-capital(how capital degrades meaning through semiotics), language has been hijacked and turned into a techno-linguistic intermediary, based on mathematical overrationalization and a language that does not connect to our human needs and wants.
The new world is one of hypercomplexitiy and hyperaccelaration, fueled by an ever more gigantic infosphere while economic life lies stiffly in the hands of a raging, profit hungry market that disregards any kinds of human emotion and sensibility while removing value from reality. We are assailed by a vast amount of information and as such our interactions are streamlined and simplified so as to be easier to understand, we are moulded more and more into a hive-mind or a swarm that acts as a mindless collective. Technology is used as a medium of control of the techo-linguistic system, Berardi affirms that future generations are beginning to be taught languages and words not by our human mothers, but by machines as we are ever more exposed and in proximity to them.
Berardi sees this assault as a next level of alienation in capitalism, if in the industrial period physical work was the one alienated, cognitive work has now become the focal point of exploitation and alienation and it is cognitive work that is degraded and made precarious this time round. He sees that the effects of a streamlined, mechanized world where our social communication and our ability to connect to one another, to solidarize and have empathy have numbed out and stomped out of focus. As this trend continues and as economics have moved into the virtual, immaterial world where value can be manipulated by speculators and where the sharpest tool of neoliberalism, debt, can wreak havoc. Using the example of the European countries afflicted by the debt crisis (Portugal, Greece, Ireland) he shows the absurdity of a people toiling away to pay of an invisible debt that they themselves have not accrued. Banks no longer hold value but our future monetized, the future of all the exploited people of IMF and ECB assaulted countries.
In accumulating value, financial capital is infinite, as it is not tied down by physical and material limitations if forecasts an infinity of accumulation. However, as we see this in the growing inequality of the world and the destruction of nature, this is potentially spelling disaster.
His solution, exploring the works of Deleuze, Guatarri and Baudrillard, is that of poetry, he sees poetry as the dimension of non-exchangability and infinity, that addresses our desires and creates a sense of autonomy and self-governance. The essence of this idea is to extract the fundamentals of how poetry functions and to apply in the construction of meaningful interactions with other people. The final goal being the reconstruction of the general intellect and the social body of people through communication and language that reflects more the world of humans than that of capital.
Furthermore he expands on the notion of irony(unconnected to cynicism) as a tool for resistance against this streamlined method of techno-linguistics. This last point being perhaps his works greatest shortcoming, using the postmodernist technique of irony. Although it is effective in revealing the truth of our connections, it is doomed to fail by nature of it's limitations, yes, it shows the absurdity of the world but it stops there and is devoid of any redeeming qualities.
August 21, 2020
While a short book, Berardi also goes the route of using poetry as a way to speak about the truth, for people. Here, he outlines the manner by which finance is used as a hyperreal field for "representing" "capturing" and "making decisions" for the elites while it is also used to obscure for commoners, what the elites are doing to them.
While poetry in continental philosophy is a bit overused, Berardi contrasts the obscuration that finance allows with the "truth" that poetry attempts to speak, finding finance to be only a thin veil on a material realism that will spark what he thinks are uprisings against the very language that oppresses people by alienating people from the decision making and corporate hiding that happens via the elites.
Berardi writes pretty concisely even if he doesn't say much. In some ways he is just part of the very movement of discontent that many feel, giving voice to the false idealizations of abundance that have not been delivered by those keeping power and creating more wealth for themselves.
While the overall message Berardi leaves us is not original he does offer us an interesting little choice between cynicism that feels the weight of the world on our powerlessness and irony that suspends signification and offers us a choice for the ethical freedom of morality and responsibility. On the one hand, if we feel chained we will always be enslaved to masters, real and imagined. If we believe that nothing means anything except the movement that must bootstrap ourselves, so we will be free to behave the way we choose to, and the world will be our making.
While poetry in continental philosophy is a bit overused, Berardi contrasts the obscuration that finance allows with the "truth" that poetry attempts to speak, finding finance to be only a thin veil on a material realism that will spark what he thinks are uprisings against the very language that oppresses people by alienating people from the decision making and corporate hiding that happens via the elites.
Berardi writes pretty concisely even if he doesn't say much. In some ways he is just part of the very movement of discontent that many feel, giving voice to the false idealizations of abundance that have not been delivered by those keeping power and creating more wealth for themselves.
While the overall message Berardi leaves us is not original he does offer us an interesting little choice between cynicism that feels the weight of the world on our powerlessness and irony that suspends signification and offers us a choice for the ethical freedom of morality and responsibility. On the one hand, if we feel chained we will always be enslaved to masters, real and imagined. If we believe that nothing means anything except the movement that must bootstrap ourselves, so we will be free to behave the way we choose to, and the world will be our making.
November 18, 2013
I'm not going to say it had any new ideas, but the ideas it had were presented with a comforting sort of swagger and defiance, like that one friend you can always count on to have a vested opinion about everything, whether or not that opinion is one you can get on board with. I also really like the rhythm of the prose, and its aggression -- I could feel myself relax while reading it, letting him be enraged for me for awhile. I'm not going to say I liked this book for normal reasons. I'm just saying it was cool.
Read
November 25, 2024What this small book lacks in argumenative rigor, it more than makes up for in passion and a keen address of what seem to be our cultural plagues today. More a sermon than an argument, really, but I'm not complaining. Its message--that slowing down, reconnecting with sensibility in the body, breathing through the voice are constructive political acts in this climate--is one I'm wholly sympathetic towards. Recommended for anyone who feels overwhelmed, or perhaps underwhelmed too.
December 23, 2024
"Since September 2008, we have known that (notwithstanding the financial virtualization of expansion) the end of capitalist growth is in sight. This could be a curse, if social welfare remains dependent on the expansion of monetary profits, and if we are unable to redefine social needs and expectations. But it could become a blessing if we redistribute social product in an egalitarian way, if we share existing resources, and if we revise our cultural expectations to be more frugal, replacing the idea that pleasure depends on ever-increasing consumption."
"Deleuze and Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus try to define fascism, and they say: fascism is when a ware machine is hidden in every niche, when in every nook and in every cranny of daily life a war machine is hidden. This is fascism.
So I would say that neoliberalism is the most perfect form of fascism, in terms of Deleuze and Guattari's definition. Competition is the concealment of a war machine in every niche of daily life: the kingdom of competition is fascism perfected."
Having read Bifo's "Breathing", the follow-up to this text, and already being familiar with Bifo through podcasts and other content, it helps that I already am used to his idiosyncrasies and passionate writing style. The Uprising, being initially published in 2011, is so prescient in its predictions of the acceleration of labor exploitation, war, and fascism following the economic crises of the early 2000s. I admire the way Bifo calls for community, poetic social action, and the denunciation of cynicism or being swept up by the late-capitalist death machine. Having recently read Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition, there are related analyses of the dissipation of use-value, in favor of precarious market value, and the trap of the homo faber style of life as it relates to the rise of technology, the deterritorialization of finance, and the abstraction of cognitive labor's value. Bifo has a sweet spot in my heart, and I very much recommend listening to him speak on podcasts or videos!
September 28, 2023
I will admit that I got lost at some of the financial history & linguistic jargon, but the introduction and final chapters were the most interesting to me personally, and gave me clear language to articulate why I believe welcoming & appreciating art/poetry is crucial to designing a more hopeful & empathetic future.
overall very fascinating!! (falls under the small but still growing category of books that would have helped me write a more cohesive undergrad thesis, which may or may not evolve someday …)
overall very fascinating!! (falls under the small but still growing category of books that would have helped me write a more cohesive undergrad thesis, which may or may not evolve someday …)
Read
January 25, 2024No idea how to rate this; I want to agree with so much of it on a gut level, but then the text doesn't provide much in the way of resources to back up its own arguments, or arguments I might want to make on its behalf.
March 14, 2018
some parts of this book were better than other parts of this book. there are some really interesting aphorisms than can be plucked away from a sea of incorrect predictions written during 2011. I could praise the bits that came true as being brilliant foresight, but doing so is like listening to one of my tarot readings and being like “see?! that one ambiguous thing I said about power came true!!”
cultural critics should really be cautious writing about the present. some of us get to be Susan Sontag, while others of us are doomed to be Francis Fukuyama.
this book would have strongly benefited from a more nuanced discussion of poetry rather than speaking about it in the most abstract way possible!
cultural critics should really be cautious writing about the present. some of us get to be Susan Sontag, while others of us are doomed to be Francis Fukuyama.
this book would have strongly benefited from a more nuanced discussion of poetry rather than speaking about it in the most abstract way possible!
June 12, 2014
dear bifo,
i don't think you actually know anything about economics--or poetry, for that matter. and if you do, then you're doing a really bad job proving it. i know literary explication has always been a weak spot for you, which is a shame because you really botched that section on rilke. also, stop yammering about fiat currency and the gold standard. besides being old hat, it makes you seem like you're avoiding any more complicated/rigorous discussions about econ. i'm not mad, i'm just disappointed, and maybe i expected more from you after reading The Soul at Work. oh, and in my edition, you use the wrong "discrete" on page 19. embarrassing!
much love,
mk
i don't think you actually know anything about economics--or poetry, for that matter. and if you do, then you're doing a really bad job proving it. i know literary explication has always been a weak spot for you, which is a shame because you really botched that section on rilke. also, stop yammering about fiat currency and the gold standard. besides being old hat, it makes you seem like you're avoiding any more complicated/rigorous discussions about econ. i'm not mad, i'm just disappointed, and maybe i expected more from you after reading The Soul at Work. oh, and in my edition, you use the wrong "discrete" on page 19. embarrassing!
much love,
mk
January 20, 2013
A poetic little book, fittingly enough, about the loss of meaning in the financial system. Berardi is a Marxist but does not call for the revolutions of the past. He claims that the solution is to fight back with irony in order to re-create meaning of community and tangible work. The global awakening will occur by overcoming the strictures of digitization and late capitalism, he says.
It's all a bit Utopic, perhaps, but there are some nicely put ideas and critiques here, sprinkled amongst some French postmodernist philosophy.
It's all a bit Utopic, perhaps, but there are some nicely put ideas and critiques here, sprinkled amongst some French postmodernist philosophy.
December 29, 2012
This was a great text. There was more on his thesis from his previous texts "The Soul at Work" and "After the Future" but also a slightly more optimistic outlook towards an activism of poetry.
September 16, 2021
Er, not a pithy review, these are the notes I took for myself. Too long for sure -
Riffs on poetry loosing words from their referent as money looses value from its own former referent; economics, the great abstraction. Symbolist poetry of the late 19th century and Richard Nixon’s 1972 loosing of the dollar from any referent of commodity or labour. Then on to lay out the myths (lies) of neoliberal politics/economics. US bank bailouts and Greek austerity for the Euro.
On the capitalist/fascist obsession with virility: ‘In late modernity, the rhetoric of the young and the devaluation of the old becomes an essential feature of advertising. Contrary to fascist discourse, late-modern advertising does not abuse old age. It denies it…’ (p67)
Attacks the faux science of economics for being divorced from actual value and wellbeing; the idea that we can (and must) live with less and that this is no ‘recession’ – ‘The financial semiotization of the economy is a war machine that destroys social resources and intellectual skills…’ (p78)
‘The first generation that learned more words from a machine than from their mothers has a problem concerning the relationship between words and the body… As far as we know, throughout human history access to language has always been mediated by trust in the mother’s body’ (p101)
On the www infosphere, one of the books main targets, ‘Sensibility - i.e., the ability to interpret and understand what cannot be expressed in verbal or digital signs - can be useless and also dangerous in an integrated system of connected nature. Sensibility slows interpretation procedures, making decodification aleatory, ambiguous and uncertain, and thus reducing the competitive efficiency of the semiotic agent […] a sort ethical insensibility seems to mark [contemporary] behaviour’ (p127). Or to put it another way, ‘Digital technology is cancelling the singular enunciative composition of polysemy, gesture and voice, and tends to produce a language that is subjected to linguistic machinery’ (p152)
‘At the chaosmotic level, rhythm is the concatenation between breathing and the surrounding universe…’ (p131) Goes on from here to describe uprisings against the elite - even those that seem directionless in their anger - as a healing mantra beyond judgement.’
When I reviewed Grayson Perry’s Playing to the Gallery I said it was a boring read because my own observations were the same as Perry’s. Well, my own observations are the same as Beradi’s, but this is not a boring read, this is an articulation of complex stuff you might suspect at the level of sensibility (to use a favourite Beradi term) but have failed to articulate in any meaningful way. A ‘you are not alone’ work of philosophy. Beradi might hope he’s affecting connection to the ‘general intellect,’ beyond philosophy’s academic remit.
The poetry of the title is the artistic slippage of language, beyond the referent that Wittgenstein would otherwise suggests defines reality. Beradi places faith in the power of poetry against the brittle semio-linguistics of economics and the internet (this faith has soured by the time of his next book – Futurability – having seen the Occupy movement come to nothing).
The penultimate chapter pitches a philosophical difference between cynicism and an irony as powerful as poetry, or perhaps it’s an irony that sustains the poet until the next fight (the cynic sleeps lightly and gets up as soon as power calls). ‘The cynic wants to be on the side of power, even though he doesn’t believe in its righteousness. The ironist simply refuses the game, recreating the world on the basis of language that is incongruent with reality’ (p166)
Riffs on poetry loosing words from their referent as money looses value from its own former referent; economics, the great abstraction. Symbolist poetry of the late 19th century and Richard Nixon’s 1972 loosing of the dollar from any referent of commodity or labour. Then on to lay out the myths (lies) of neoliberal politics/economics. US bank bailouts and Greek austerity for the Euro.
On the capitalist/fascist obsession with virility: ‘In late modernity, the rhetoric of the young and the devaluation of the old becomes an essential feature of advertising. Contrary to fascist discourse, late-modern advertising does not abuse old age. It denies it…’ (p67)
Attacks the faux science of economics for being divorced from actual value and wellbeing; the idea that we can (and must) live with less and that this is no ‘recession’ – ‘The financial semiotization of the economy is a war machine that destroys social resources and intellectual skills…’ (p78)
‘The first generation that learned more words from a machine than from their mothers has a problem concerning the relationship between words and the body… As far as we know, throughout human history access to language has always been mediated by trust in the mother’s body’ (p101)
On the www infosphere, one of the books main targets, ‘Sensibility - i.e., the ability to interpret and understand what cannot be expressed in verbal or digital signs - can be useless and also dangerous in an integrated system of connected nature. Sensibility slows interpretation procedures, making decodification aleatory, ambiguous and uncertain, and thus reducing the competitive efficiency of the semiotic agent […] a sort ethical insensibility seems to mark [contemporary] behaviour’ (p127). Or to put it another way, ‘Digital technology is cancelling the singular enunciative composition of polysemy, gesture and voice, and tends to produce a language that is subjected to linguistic machinery’ (p152)
‘At the chaosmotic level, rhythm is the concatenation between breathing and the surrounding universe…’ (p131) Goes on from here to describe uprisings against the elite - even those that seem directionless in their anger - as a healing mantra beyond judgement.’
When I reviewed Grayson Perry’s Playing to the Gallery I said it was a boring read because my own observations were the same as Perry’s. Well, my own observations are the same as Beradi’s, but this is not a boring read, this is an articulation of complex stuff you might suspect at the level of sensibility (to use a favourite Beradi term) but have failed to articulate in any meaningful way. A ‘you are not alone’ work of philosophy. Beradi might hope he’s affecting connection to the ‘general intellect,’ beyond philosophy’s academic remit.
The poetry of the title is the artistic slippage of language, beyond the referent that Wittgenstein would otherwise suggests defines reality. Beradi places faith in the power of poetry against the brittle semio-linguistics of economics and the internet (this faith has soured by the time of his next book – Futurability – having seen the Occupy movement come to nothing).
The penultimate chapter pitches a philosophical difference between cynicism and an irony as powerful as poetry, or perhaps it’s an irony that sustains the poet until the next fight (the cynic sleeps lightly and gets up as soon as power calls). ‘The cynic wants to be on the side of power, even though he doesn’t believe in its righteousness. The ironist simply refuses the game, recreating the world on the basis of language that is incongruent with reality’ (p166)
December 27, 2018
I discovered Franco "Bifo" Berardi a few weeks ago, when he's almost 70. Gee! Better late than never.
This is a beautiful yellow little book. I read it in about 3 hours, as a sort of post-Christmas ritual of disconnection.
Although published in 2012 the book is still actual. Franco Berardi builds up in that typical italian fashion a very passionate case (with its many repetitions and non-linearities) for a collective awakening in this post-crisis situation we still find ourselves in.
The key of this book is its title: On poetry and finance, and delivers the only concrete solution for resistance and change that I could extract from all my marxist readings so far.
To break out of the capitalist mindset one has to first break out of the limits of language, as how Wittgenstein taught us, these are also the limits of our world.
"Digital financial capitalism has created a closed reality which cannot be overcome with the techniques of politics, of conscious organized voluntary action, and of government. The way out of this prison can only be found through an act of language. Language has an infinite potency but it's exercised in the finite conditions of history and existence. Thanks to the establishment of a limit, the world comes into existence as a world of language. Grammar, logic, and ethics are based on the institution of a limit. But infinity remains unmeasurable. Poetry is the reopening of the indefinite, the ironic act of exceeding the established meaning of words. As language today is defined and limited by its economic exchangeability, it's transformed to information, an incorporation of techno-linguistic automatisms. But poetry is language's excess, to use the structuralist perspective, its signifier is disentangled from the limits of its signified."
Wow! So beautifully put by Franco Berardi.
But he doesn't stop here and executes a perfect coup de foudre and he brings in Peter Sloterdijk's dichotomy between kynismus and zynismus!
"Kynismus being the ascetic way through which Diogenes and his fellow rejected the acquiescence to the law of the powerful and zynismus being the state in which the conformist majority, fully aware that the law of the majority is bad, still bend to it because there's nothing else to do."
"Zynismus is not disruptive. It's only an internalization of the impotence of truth which is born out of the failure of the 20-th century utopian ideologies and the perception that exploitation of labour, competition and war are inevitable and irreversible (capitalism). Mass cynicism results from the dissolution of social solidarity and the systemic precariousness of the labour market results from the neoliberal deregulation that imposed competition as the inescapable, generalized mode of relation among people."
Poetry, seen as an ironic act thus "...suspends the semantic value of the signifier and chooses freely among a thousand possible interpretations. Cynicism starts from the same suspension, but is a slavish modulation of irony: irony at the service of power. While irony does not postulate the existence of any reality, cynicism postulates the inescapable reality of power, particularly the power of the economy...the cynical mood starts from the idea that ethical action has no possibility of succeeding. The ironist sleeps happily because nothing can awake her from her dreams. The cynicist sleeps a light sleep, he dreams nightmares, and he gets up as soon as power calls him"
At the end, as an antidote to cynicism, Franco Berardi doesn't propose passion, but irony through poetry. This is the only avenue we have to expand our language and thus the limits of our world.
This is a beautiful yellow little book. I read it in about 3 hours, as a sort of post-Christmas ritual of disconnection.
Although published in 2012 the book is still actual. Franco Berardi builds up in that typical italian fashion a very passionate case (with its many repetitions and non-linearities) for a collective awakening in this post-crisis situation we still find ourselves in.
The key of this book is its title: On poetry and finance, and delivers the only concrete solution for resistance and change that I could extract from all my marxist readings so far.
To break out of the capitalist mindset one has to first break out of the limits of language, as how Wittgenstein taught us, these are also the limits of our world.
"Digital financial capitalism has created a closed reality which cannot be overcome with the techniques of politics, of conscious organized voluntary action, and of government. The way out of this prison can only be found through an act of language. Language has an infinite potency but it's exercised in the finite conditions of history and existence. Thanks to the establishment of a limit, the world comes into existence as a world of language. Grammar, logic, and ethics are based on the institution of a limit. But infinity remains unmeasurable. Poetry is the reopening of the indefinite, the ironic act of exceeding the established meaning of words. As language today is defined and limited by its economic exchangeability, it's transformed to information, an incorporation of techno-linguistic automatisms. But poetry is language's excess, to use the structuralist perspective, its signifier is disentangled from the limits of its signified."
Wow! So beautifully put by Franco Berardi.
But he doesn't stop here and executes a perfect coup de foudre and he brings in Peter Sloterdijk's dichotomy between kynismus and zynismus!
"Kynismus being the ascetic way through which Diogenes and his fellow rejected the acquiescence to the law of the powerful and zynismus being the state in which the conformist majority, fully aware that the law of the majority is bad, still bend to it because there's nothing else to do."
"Zynismus is not disruptive. It's only an internalization of the impotence of truth which is born out of the failure of the 20-th century utopian ideologies and the perception that exploitation of labour, competition and war are inevitable and irreversible (capitalism). Mass cynicism results from the dissolution of social solidarity and the systemic precariousness of the labour market results from the neoliberal deregulation that imposed competition as the inescapable, generalized mode of relation among people."
Poetry, seen as an ironic act thus "...suspends the semantic value of the signifier and chooses freely among a thousand possible interpretations. Cynicism starts from the same suspension, but is a slavish modulation of irony: irony at the service of power. While irony does not postulate the existence of any reality, cynicism postulates the inescapable reality of power, particularly the power of the economy...the cynical mood starts from the idea that ethical action has no possibility of succeeding. The ironist sleeps happily because nothing can awake her from her dreams. The cynicist sleeps a light sleep, he dreams nightmares, and he gets up as soon as power calls him"
At the end, as an antidote to cynicism, Franco Berardi doesn't propose passion, but irony through poetry. This is the only avenue we have to expand our language and thus the limits of our world.
December 14, 2019
The cynicist sleeps a light sleep, he dreams nightmares, and he gets up as soon as power calls him.
(p. 169)
Interesting read. It tries to connect two topics one wouldn't typically think fit together: poetry and finance. He points out that in the same way that the French Symbolists (particularly Rimbaud) tried to free language from it's everyday meaning and make it evocative of something abstract- so late-stage capitalism has done with money. Money has become something abstract, a "function of language" and human social relations run under the abstract ideas of exchange, growth, etc. Berardi calls for a "reactivation of the desiring force of enunciation (expression)" (p. 20) in poetry. Poetry should be the force for freeing society from economic dogma of exchange and debt, since poetry is the "language of nonexchangeability" (p. 140) and thus "a hidden resource which enables us to shift from one paradigm to another." (p. 140) Only poetry can bring back the sensibility which financial capitalism has tried to erase by its mathematicization of human relations and it's incessant need to make everything easy. "...power is all about making things easy." Berardi says. So the new poetry should be singular, complex and evocative of things that cannot be said.
Sensibiliry is the ability to understand what cannot be verbalized, and it has been a victim of the precarization and fractalization," (or, the objectification and exchangibility) ",of time." (p. 143)
(p. 169)
Interesting read. It tries to connect two topics one wouldn't typically think fit together: poetry and finance. He points out that in the same way that the French Symbolists (particularly Rimbaud) tried to free language from it's everyday meaning and make it evocative of something abstract- so late-stage capitalism has done with money. Money has become something abstract, a "function of language" and human social relations run under the abstract ideas of exchange, growth, etc. Berardi calls for a "reactivation of the desiring force of enunciation (expression)" (p. 20) in poetry. Poetry should be the force for freeing society from economic dogma of exchange and debt, since poetry is the "language of nonexchangeability" (p. 140) and thus "a hidden resource which enables us to shift from one paradigm to another." (p. 140) Only poetry can bring back the sensibility which financial capitalism has tried to erase by its mathematicization of human relations and it's incessant need to make everything easy. "...power is all about making things easy." Berardi says. So the new poetry should be singular, complex and evocative of things that cannot be said.
Sensibiliry is the ability to understand what cannot be verbalized, and it has been a victim of the precarization and fractalization," (or, the objectification and exchangibility) ",of time." (p. 143)
November 28, 2024
Reading The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance was a thought-provoking journey that pushed me to rethink the intersection of art, language, and the economy. Franco "Bifo" Berardi’s central argument—that financial capitalism has colonized language itself, leaving poetry as a space of resistance—felt both radical and deeply resonant in our hyper-digital age.
Berardi’s prose is dense but rewarding, weaving together philosophy, political economy, and literature with a poetic flair that mirrors his message. I appreciated how he drew connections between the abstraction of finance and the alienation we experience in modern life. His advocacy for poetry as a means to reclaim human emotion and collective imagination struck a chord with me, offering a hopeful counterpoint to the grim realities he critiques.
That said, the book can feel overwhelming at times. Berardi’s arguments, though compelling, occasionally meander, and his theoretical leaps might leave readers unfamiliar with his references scrambling to keep up. Still, his passion and originality shine through, making this a rewarding read for anyone interested in the intersection of art and activism.
Overall, The Uprising is a challenging but necessary call to arms for creatives and thinkers alike. It's a book I’ll be mulling over for a long time.
Berardi’s prose is dense but rewarding, weaving together philosophy, political economy, and literature with a poetic flair that mirrors his message. I appreciated how he drew connections between the abstraction of finance and the alienation we experience in modern life. His advocacy for poetry as a means to reclaim human emotion and collective imagination struck a chord with me, offering a hopeful counterpoint to the grim realities he critiques.
That said, the book can feel overwhelming at times. Berardi’s arguments, though compelling, occasionally meander, and his theoretical leaps might leave readers unfamiliar with his references scrambling to keep up. Still, his passion and originality shine through, making this a rewarding read for anyone interested in the intersection of art and activism.
Overall, The Uprising is a challenging but necessary call to arms for creatives and thinkers alike. It's a book I’ll be mulling over for a long time.
January 10, 2025
A short stint through some inspired ideas, presented as disconnected asides. Berardi moves on to new thoughts before providing evidence or reasoning for the previous, leaving the whole book feeling underbaked. That’s not to say the ideas aren’t good — in fact, some of them provide real relishing moments of clarity. Ultimately however, these moments pass quickly as the short chapter ends and the next one begins, picking up on some other tangent.
It is always a shame when thinkers of that bubbled, left-ey ilk write about the fractures of our global financial system, the precipice of collapse, the social explosion! … and then a decade passes. The collapse they dreamt up, having not become realized, apprears more like a writing technique than a rigorous account of the systems in place. My negativity gets the best of me, so I’ll end with some ideas I enjoyed.
“Once upon a time, pleasure was repressed by power. Now it is advertised and promised, and simultaneously postponed and deceived. This is the pornographic feature of semi-production in the sphere of the market.” (146)
“The conscious and sensitive organism, the living individuality walking towards extinction, is finite. But the creation of possible universes of meaning is infinite. Desire is the field of this tendency of the finite towards a becoming-infinite.” (154)
It is always a shame when thinkers of that bubbled, left-ey ilk write about the fractures of our global financial system, the precipice of collapse, the social explosion! … and then a decade passes. The collapse they dreamt up, having not become realized, apprears more like a writing technique than a rigorous account of the systems in place. My negativity gets the best of me, so I’ll end with some ideas I enjoyed.
“Once upon a time, pleasure was repressed by power. Now it is advertised and promised, and simultaneously postponed and deceived. This is the pornographic feature of semi-production in the sphere of the market.” (146)
“The conscious and sensitive organism, the living individuality walking towards extinction, is finite. But the creation of possible universes of meaning is infinite. Desire is the field of this tendency of the finite towards a becoming-infinite.” (154)
June 12, 2025
Oh, my beautiful Berardi.
What Berardi's writing offers us: A capitalist future has nothing to offer us, and if there is any demand someone makes when they call themselves an artist, it is to hope for a future beyond this, to hope for a future beyond despair by using despair.
Berardi understands financialization and the markets, the supposed "science" of economy that demands our belief in it, better than any financer or economist. It's only poetics that can approach this understanding. Hm. Great read. Reminds me to start that Substack I was supposedly going to start 3 years ago.
I assume I'll revisit this work, especially the last section about Irony and Cynicism (for Berardi, the ethical approach is through the former).
What Berardi's writing offers us: A capitalist future has nothing to offer us, and if there is any demand someone makes when they call themselves an artist, it is to hope for a future beyond this, to hope for a future beyond despair by using despair.
Berardi understands financialization and the markets, the supposed "science" of economy that demands our belief in it, better than any financer or economist. It's only poetics that can approach this understanding. Hm. Great read. Reminds me to start that Substack I was supposedly going to start 3 years ago.
I assume I'll revisit this work, especially the last section about Irony and Cynicism (for Berardi, the ethical approach is through the former).
June 12, 2025
Oh, my beautiful Berardi.
What Berardi's writing offers us: A capitalist future has nothing to offer us, and if there is any demand someone makes when they call themselves an artist, it is to hope for a future beyond this, to hope for a future beyond despair by using despair.
Berardi understands financialization and the markets, the supposed "science" of economy that demands our belief in it, better than any financer or economist. It's only poetics that can approach this understanding. Hm. Great read. Reminds me to start that Substack I was supposedly going to start 3 years ago.
I assume I'll revisit this work, especially the last section about Irony and Cynicism (for Berardi, the ethical approach is through the former).
What Berardi's writing offers us: A capitalist future has nothing to offer us, and if there is any demand someone makes when they call themselves an artist, it is to hope for a future beyond this, to hope for a future beyond despair by using despair.
Berardi understands financialization and the markets, the supposed "science" of economy that demands our belief in it, better than any financer or economist. It's only poetics that can approach this understanding. Hm. Great read. Reminds me to start that Substack I was supposedly going to start 3 years ago.
I assume I'll revisit this work, especially the last section about Irony and Cynicism (for Berardi, the ethical approach is through the former).
June 1, 2018
This book is pure feeling. But it's reiterative. And if you read other of his material it becomes redundant. Nevertheless, the goal is sincere and powerful: to wake us from the direction the world is heading. I was waiting for a deepening in the poetry argument, but is rather abstract and mostly about finance speculation, than poetry. He just says poetry can be a way of re-erotizing life, now that is precarious, but does not explain why. I would have liked some data. Not one of his best books, but a great one to drive into other ways of seeing the present. A good introductory book to Bifo's work.
December 21, 2022
This isn’t actually an argumentative book, it’s an aesthetic, a manifesto. Granted I’m still relatively new to critical theory, but I really just felt like the language was unbearably opaque and didn’t really buy anything for it. Also the first three chapters jump around too much and the only reason it worked is cuz I already agreed, which then shows I’m not learning anything new. The last chapter is by far the best, wish the book had spent a little less time setting the scene and inventing new terminology to replace simpler terms that already exist for the same stuff and more time expanding on that last idea of poetry and irony as resistance to semio capitalism
April 24, 2018
Great theory about perceptions of time and how attempted acceleration of mental labor affects attention-span and wellbeing. But really shallow understandings of poetry, language, and affect here that never grapple with affective labor. Presenting poetry and "mantra" as the solution to material inequality misses the need for multi-pronged modes of resistance that compel a redistribution of the material world, including of affect.
January 18, 2023
Berardi has a lot of interesting ideas but I become lost in his application of his ideas to our material world. Between this one and Breathing, I have found many quotations that I’ve found profound and moving but cannot say I appreciate the works as wholes. I’d like to give it another shot some day.
January 14, 2025
Irony is an opening of a game of infinite pos-sibilities; cynicism is a dissociation of ethics and possibility. The cynical mood starts from the idea that ethical action has no possibility of succeeding.
The ironist sleeps happily because nothing can awake her from her dreams. The cynicist sleeps a light sleep, he dreams nightmares, and he gets up as soon as power calls him.
The ironist sleeps happily because nothing can awake her from her dreams. The cynicist sleeps a light sleep, he dreams nightmares, and he gets up as soon as power calls him.
January 9, 2024
“Because of the technological revolution produced by information technology, the relation between time and value has been deregulated. Simultaneously, the relation between the sign and the thing has blurred, as the ontological guarantee of meaning based on the referential status of the signifier has broken apart.”
“Governance is a keyword in the process of the financialization of the world. Pure functionality without meaning. Automation
of thought and will.”
“Mathematics becomes ferocious when it is forcibly inscribed into the living organism of society, and this ferocious mathematization of the living body of society is preparing the worst evolution of Europe. It should be ludicrous to say that Goldman Sachs consultants, or the European Central Bank director, or the chancellor of Germany, are Nazis.
They don't look like sadistic murderers, but…
…In this way they are simultaneously establishing a cold form of totalitarianism, and preparing a hot form of massive fascist reaction. The abstract, cold violence of deterritorialized financial dictatorship is preparing the violent reterritorialization of the reactive body of European society: nation, race, ethnic cleansing, and religious fundamentalism are reappearing on the scene.”
“Governance is a keyword in the process of the financialization of the world. Pure functionality without meaning. Automation
of thought and will.”
“Mathematics becomes ferocious when it is forcibly inscribed into the living organism of society, and this ferocious mathematization of the living body of society is preparing the worst evolution of Europe. It should be ludicrous to say that Goldman Sachs consultants, or the European Central Bank director, or the chancellor of Germany, are Nazis.
They don't look like sadistic murderers, but…
…In this way they are simultaneously establishing a cold form of totalitarianism, and preparing a hot form of massive fascist reaction. The abstract, cold violence of deterritorialized financial dictatorship is preparing the violent reterritorialization of the reactive body of European society: nation, race, ethnic cleansing, and religious fundamentalism are reappearing on the scene.”
April 27, 2024
4.5 leaning towards the five
A very good discussion. I may just be stupid but it occasionally seems unfocused. Overall solid though.
“Bifo” is now climbing to the top of the my list of contemporary philosophers.
A very good discussion. I may just be stupid but it occasionally seems unfocused. Overall solid though.
“Bifo” is now climbing to the top of the my list of contemporary philosophers.
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