BIFO

Alex Sherman
CASE
 1AC
But tell me, who are these vagrants, these even a little
More transitory than we, these from the start
Violently wrung (and for whose sake?)
By a never-appeasable will? But it wrings them,
Bends them, slings them and swings them,
Throws them and catches them; as if from an oily,
More slippery air they come down
On the carpet worn thinner by their eternal leaping,
This carpet lost in the universe.
Stuck there like a plaster, as if the sky
Of the suburb had hurt the earth
[Rainer Maria Rilke “The Fifth Elegy”//ASherm]

Economists are the priests of a dead god – capitalism no longer functions through
a direct means of production but through parasitically draining the neural energy
of its victims, the sign of money has been divorced from its referent, paving the
way for neoliberal marriage of the future with economic growth, death, and
destruction
Bifo 11 [Franco Berardi, aka “Bifo,” founder of the famous “Radio Alice” in Bologna and an
important figure of the Italian Autonomia Movement, is a writer, media theorist, and media
activist. He currently teaches Social History of the Media at the Accademia di Brera, Milan. “The
Future After the End of the Economy”//ASherm]
It is the end of summer 2011 and the economic newspapers increasingly warn that there will be a double dip. Economists predict a
new recession before there can be a recovery. I think they are wrong. There will be a recession—on that I agree—but
there will be no more recoveries, no return to the process of constant economic growth. To say this
in public would be to invite accusations of being a traitor, a cynic, a doomsayer. Economists will condemn you as a villain. But
economists are not people of wisdom, and I do not even consider them scientists. They are more like priests,
denouncing the bad behavior of society, asking you to repent for your debts, threatening inflation and misery for your
sins, worshipping the dogmas of growth and competition. What is a science after all? Without embarking on epistemological
definitions, I would simply say that science is a form of knowledge free of dogma, that can extrapolate
general laws from the observation of empirical phenomena, and that can therefore predict
something about what will happen next. It also a way of understanding the types of changes that Thomas Kuhn
labeled paradigm shifts. As far as I know, the discourse known as economics does not correspond to this description. First of all,
economists are obsessed with dogmatic notions such as growth, competition, and gross national product. They profess social reality
to be in crisis if it is does not conform to the dictates of these notions. Secondly, economists are incapable of inferring laws from the
observation of reality, as they prefer instead that reality harmonize with their own supposed laws. As a consequence, they cannot
predict anything—and experience has shown this to be the case in the last three or four years. Finally, economists cannot
recognize changes in the social paradigm, and they refuse to adjust their conceptual framework
accordingly. They insist instead that reality must be changed to correspond to their outdated criteria. In the schools of
economics and in business schools they do not teach or learn about physics, chemistry, biology,
astronomy—subjects that deserve to be called sciences, that conceptualize a specific field of reality. Rather, these
schools teach and study a technology, a set of tools, procedures, and pragmatic protocols
intended to twist social reality to serve practical purposes: profits, accumulation, power. Economic reality does
not exist. It is the result of a process of technical modeling, of submission and exploitation. The
theoretical discourse that
supports this economic technology can be defined as ideology, in the sense proposed by Marx—
who was not an economist, but a critic of political economy. Ideology is in fact a theoretical technology aimed at advancing special
political and social goals. And economic ideology, like all technologies, is not self-reflexive and therefore cannot develop a theoretical
self-understanding. It cannot reframe itself in relation to a paradigm shift. The development of productive forces, as
a global network of cognitive labor that Marx called the “general intellect,” has provoked an
enormous increase in the productive potency of labor. This potency can no longer be semiotized,
organized, and contained by the social form of capitalism. Capitalism is no longer able to semiotize and
organize the social potency of cognitive productivity, because value can no longer be defined in terms of average
necessary work time. Therefore, the old forms of private property and salaried labor are no longer
able to semiotize and organize the deterritorialized nature of capital and social labor. The shift from
the industrial form of production to the semiotic form of production—the shift from physical labor to cognitive
labor—has propelled capitalism out of itself, out of its ideological self-conception. Economists are
dazzled by this transformation, as knowledge that had previously been structured according to the
paradigm of bourgeois capitalism: linear accumulation, measurability of value, private
appropriation of surplus value. The bourgeoisie, which was a territorialized class (the class of the
bourg, of the city), was able to manage physical property and a measurable relation between time and
value. The total financialization of capital marks the end of the old bourgeoisie and opens the door to a deterritorialized and
rhizomatic proliferation of economic power relations. Now the old bourgeoisie no longer has power. They have
been replaced by a proliferating virtual class—a deterritorialized and pulverized social dust
rather than a territorialized group of persons—usually referred to as the financial markets.
Labor undergoes a parallel process of pulverization and deterritorialization not only in the loss of a regular
job and a stable income, but in the precarious relationships between worker and territory.
Precarization is an effect of the fragmentation and pulverization of work. The cognitive worker, in fact, does not need to be linked to
a place. His or her activity can be spread in non-physical territory. The old economic categories—
salary, private property, linear growth—no longer make sense in this new situation. The productivity
of the general intellect in terms of use value (i.e., the production of useful semiotic goods) has virtually no limits. So how can
semiotic labor be valued if its products are immaterial? How can the relationship between work
and salary be determined? How can we measure value in terms of time if the productivity of
cognitive work (creative, affective, linguistic) cannot be quantified and standardized? The notion of
growth is crucial in the conceptual framework of economic technology. If social production does not
comply with the economic expectations of growth, economists decree that society is sick. Trembling, they name the disease:
recession. This diagnosis has nothing to do with the needs of the population because it does not refer to the use value of things and
semiotic goods, but to abstract capitalist accumulation—accumulation of exchange value. Growth, in the economic sense,
is not about increasing social happiness and satisfying people’s basic needs. It is about
expanding the global volume of exchange value for the sake of profit. Gross national product, the
main indicator of growth, is not a measure of social welfare and pleasure, but a monetary
measure, while social happiness or unhappiness is generally not dependent on the amount of money circulating in the economy.
It is dependent, rather, on the distribution of wealth and the balance between cultural expectations
and the availability of physical and semiotic goods. Growth is a cultural concept more than an economic criterion
for the evaluation of social health and well-being. It is linked to the modern conception of the future as infinite expansion. For many
reasons, infinite expansion has become an impossible task for the social body. Since the Club of Rome published the book The Limits
to Growth in 1972, we have understood that Earth’s natural resources are limited and that social production
has to be redefined according to this knowledge.2 But the cognitive transformation of production
and the creation of a semiocapitalist sphere opened up new possibilities for expansion. In the 1990s
the overall economy expanded euphorically while the net economy was expected to usher in the prospect of infinite growth. This was
a deception. Even if the general intellect is infinitely productive, the limits to growth are inscribed
in the affective body of cognitive work: limits of attention, of psychic energy, of sensibility. After
the illusions of the new economy—spread by the wired neoliberal ideologists—and the deception of the dot-com crash, the beginning
of the new century announced the coming collapse of the financial economy. Since September 2008 we know that,
notwithstanding the financial virtualization of expansion, the end of capitalist growth is in sight.
This will be a curse if social welfare is indeed dependent on the expansion of profits and if we are unable to redefine social needs and
expectations. But it will be a blessing if we can distribute and share existing resources in an
egalitarian way, and if we can shift our cultural expectations in a frugal direction, replacing the
idea that pleasure depends on ever-growing consumption. Modern culture has equated economic expansion
with the future, so that for economists, it is impossible to consider the future independently of economic growth. But this
identification has to be abandoned and the concept of the future rethought. The economic mind
cannot make the jump to this new dimension, it cannot understand this paradigm shift. This is why
the economy is in crisis and why economic wisdom cannot cope with the new reality. The financial semiotization of the
economy is a war machine that daily destroys social resources and intellectual skills. Look at
what is happening in Europe. After centuries of industrial production the European continent is rich, with millions of
technicians, poets, doctors, inventors, specialized factory workers, nuclear engineers, and so forth. So how did we suddenly become
so poor? Something very simple happened. The entirety of the wealth that workers produced was poured
into the strongboxes of a minuscule minority of exploiters and speculators. The whole
mechanism of the European financial crisis is oriented towards the most extraordinary
displacement of wealth in history: from society towards the financial class, towards financial capitalism. The wealth
produced by the collective intelligence has been siphoned off and expropriated, leading to the
impoverishment of the richest places in the world and the creation of a financial machine that
destroys use value and displaces monetary wealth. Recession is the economic way of semiotizing the present
contradiction between the productive potency of the general intellect and its financial constraints. 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 is not easy to identify financial capitalists as individual
persons, just as finance is not the monetary counterpart of a certain number of physical goods.
Rather, it is an effect of language. It is the transversal function of immaterialization and the
performative action of indexicality—statistics, figures, indexes, fears, and expectations are not
linguistic representations of some economic referent that can be found somewhere in the
physical world, as signifiers referring to a signified. They are performative acts of speech producing immediate
effects in the very instant of their enunciation. This is why, when you try to seek out the financial class, you
cannot talk with someone, negotiate, or fight against an enemy. There are no enemies, no
persons with whom to negotiate. There are only mathematical implications, automatic social concatenations that one
cannot dismantle, or even avoid. Finance seems inhumane and pitiless because it is not human and therefore has no pity. It can be
defined as a mathematical cancer traversing a large part of society. Those who are involved in the financial game are far more
numerous than the personal owners of the old bourgeoisie. Often unwittingly and unwillingly, people have been dragged
into investing their money and their future in the financial game. Those who have invested their
pensions in private funds, those who have signed mortgages half-consciously, those who have
fallen into the trap of easy credit have become part of the transversal function of finance. They are
poor people, workers, and pensioners whose futures depend on the fluctuations of a stock market they do not control or fully
understand. Only if we are able to disentangle the future (the perception of the future, the concept of the future, and
the very production of the future) from
the traps of growth and investment will we find a way out of the
vicious subjugation of life, wealth, and pleasure to the financial abstraction of semiocapital. The
key to this disentanglement can be found in a new form of wisdom: harmonizing with
exhaustion. Exhaustion is a cursed word in the frame of modern culture, which is based on the cult of energy and the cult of
male aggressiveness. But energy is fading in the postmodern world for many reasons that are easy to detect. Demographic trends
reveal that, as life expectancy increases and birth rate decreases, mankind as a whole is growing old. This process of general
aging produces a sense of exhaustion, and what was once considered a blessing—increased life
expectancy—may become a misfortune if the myth of energy is not restrained and replaced with a
myth of solidarity and compassion. Energy is fading also because basic physical resources such
as oil are doomed to extinction or dramatic depletion. And energy is fading because competition is stupid in the
age of the general intellect. The general intellect is not based on juvenile impulse and male
aggressiveness, on fighting, winning, and appropriation. It is based on cooperation and sharing.
This is why the future is over. We are living in a space that is beyond the future. If we come to terms
with this post-futuristic condition, we can renounce accumulation and growth and be happy sharing the
wealth that comes from past industrial labor and present collective intelligence. If we cannot do
this, we are doomed to live in a century of violence, misery, and war
This semiocapitalistic deterritorialization of wealth is especially visible in china,
where an importation of western economic discourse has laid the foundation for
the self-exploitation of millions of creative laborers
Kanngeiser 12 [Anja Kanngeiser is a professor of social geography at goldsmiths university
“Creative labour in Shanghai: Questions on politics, composition and ambivalence”//ASherm]
Despite stringent censorship on internet communications by the state, the access to pirated software, peer 2 peer and social
networking sites played a large role in the explosion of the creative fields, not only in the distributive capacities for creative talent
and marketing, but also in the production, circulation and consumption of creative subcultural life worlds, for instance the
independent music and arts, design and fashion industries.7 This is hardly surprising given the extent to which social networking
and online sites function as digital platforms for the constitution of different civil and public communities in China, as both Shubo Li
(2010) and Zixue Tai (2006) have argued. According to Lisa Li and Zafka Zhang writing on the blog China Youth Watch, which sells
itself as ‘catching the pulse of China youth’, China sees not only a growing supply of creative
products/contents but also a huge size of creativity-seekers in the young generation. There's the
saying all the artistic youth in China gather on Douban. Whatever ‘cool stuff’ you are talking about, you are assured to find at least
one group on it. (2008)8 Obviously there are commonalities in the commodification of social labour
regardless of its sites of articulation. Whether in Asia or Europe what is primarily capitalised upon is
artistic innovation in the form of imaginative and affective relationalities. This is what drives consumer
desire, made visible through social networks and communicative faculties – the becoming labour of language and
empathy, as we have seen (Virno, 2004; Berardi, 2009a, 2009b). Michael Keane has noted, however, that while creative
fields in the West are imbued with histories and fantasies of the liberated artist and the transcendence of aesthetics, this is not the
case in China (2009). Furthermore, as Wang points out, peculiar also to the development of the cultural and
creative fields in China is an intense symbiosis of state and corporate apparatuses (2004). The
tension between, on the one hand, mass collective labour and economic expansion and on the other,
individuation and self-expression, is also worthy of note given the historical conditions of
Chinese socialist labour regimes. These aspects grate against European understandings of creative labour, and
antagonise any easy translation of political vocabularies trans-contextually. Within China, Shanghai is claimed to
have ‘by far the most ambitious creative industries programme’ and as ‘the most “Western” city in China on
its own admission, is thus set to take the lead in the creative industries’ (O’Conner and Xin, 2006, p. 281). As Li Wu Wei and Hua
Jian propose, the potential for the creative industries in Shanghai is particularly high for a number of reasons: first, its pre-existing
industry infrastructure; second, its ‘historical industrial heritage’ (2006, p. 168); third, its cultural diversity and mix of Eastern and
Western influences; and fourth, its desirability to ‘talent’ boosted by China's ‘open door policy’ (ibid.). Unique to Shanghai is also a
distinctive combination of ‘industrial clustering, government agency promotion, and policy
support’ (ibid.). The impact of the creative markets has been most clearly evinced by the sharp
increase in arts infrastructures: according to a UNESCO report, Shanghai now features the largest territory of creative
clusters worldwide, with over 6110 creative enterprises originating from more than 30 countries and regions, employing over
114 700 people (2011). By the end of 2010 the creative industries were expected to be generating around 10 per cent of Shanghai's
GDP (Yu, 2007). Given this staggering escalation of the field since its 2005 inception, what is of interest are the new
kinds of social assemblages arising from these recent labour constellations, and the modes of
organisation and regulation that they have engendered. The social and class assemblages and
subjectivities arising from Shanghai's new creative sector are complex, and there is an uneven
distribution of labour, despite a propensity to label creative workers as the burgeoning elite class. First, this is because of the
wide array of work and working conditions that fall under the category of ‘creative’ in China. As Zhang (2007) shows, this ranges
from advertising, IT, media and science research to hairdressing, agriculture and textiles. Second, the supply chains consolidating
these industries are also imperative to acknowledge. As the Transit Labour project illustrates, this includes the processing and
assemblage of raw materials and components, traditionally factory labour, to waste collection and recycling, comprised of both
formal and informal economies and structures. The inclusion of service labour to this category is also imperative. This is what
troubles any meta-analysis of the economic and social composition of the living labour that populates innovation and creative work.
Two contrasting perspectives seem to dominate – common to both is an aspirationalist desire. This can be both de-politicising and
politicising in unconventional ways, as will later be discussed. On the one hand, as Jing Wang comments, the rising ‘creative class’ …
have deep pockets, networking capital with the state, and a lifestyle characteristic of the nouveau riche. Totally indifferent to public
issues concerning the truly socially dislocated (i.e. rural migrants) those twenty- and thirty-somethings are a species that even the
most enthusiastic advocates of creative industries would find difficult to romanticize. (2004, p. 17) The stereotype identified by
Wang is certainly not exceptional. A brief scan of online materials cites the same glamorous, vertiginously
successful lifestyle criticised by Wang (Chen, 2007; Keenlyside, 2008; Fringe Shanghai, 2010; Tian, 2010). What
must be acknowledged with regard to this stereotype, furthermore, is its connection to the
expatriate community, which comprises in large part the management hierarchy and
contributes to the unevenness in labour and economic distribution. The influx of Western and
more broadly transnational businesses and entrepreneurs, and the workforce comprising the professional
classes, impacts the shaping of aspirations of young people for hyper-consumer capitalist
culture. On the other hand, a number of the young Chinese creatives we spoke with described their background, and those of
their friends and peers, as working or middle class, often migrating from rural territories either with their families or alone for the
pursuance of higher education. This is obviously not to suggest that all of those within the creative sectors come from working-class
demographics, but simply to note that each industry contains diversities that cannot be easily homogenised. Many of the
young workers we spoke to articulated a struggle within the job market, both their own and their
peers, and an apprehension around future job security. On a national scale, this seeming
precariousness is supported by the growing awareness (Agencies, 2010; Crowley, 2010; Jennings, 2010;
Madariaga, 2010) of what has been termed ‘ant tribes’: the flexible and low-waged aggregation of young
graduates without job contracts or social security living in highly condensed diasporas on the
metropolitan outskirts. Similarly, there has been documentation of factory labour in Chinese provinces, such as Dafen,
where the manufacture and mass production of aesthetic objects occur (Paetsch, 2006). In a telling gesture one graduate from the
prestigious Peking University even posted on the Chinese Ganji (online used goods trading website) ‘I am willing to sell my Peking
University diploma for one yuan’. According to Paolo Do, this was because since 2003 the graduate had not found employment
paying more than 1500 yuan per month, less than that offered for much unqualified work (2010). From these contrasting
perspectives it is hardly surprising that Pang cautions that it is necessary to address the complexities within the constituencies of the
creative fields and to understand such complexity as ‘politically confounding because it constantly incorporates and interjects
different kinds of labor and different ways of thinking, although it also means that workers are exposed to exploitation on different
fronts’ (2009, p. 72). The composition of this workforce from a socio-economic standpoint is even
more layered when one takes into account China's national history over the latter half of the
twentieth century. Chris Connery proposed during an interview on 3 August 2010 that the broad sweep of Chairman Mao's
cultural revolution and the attempted rehabilitation of the bourgeoisie meant that class composition was fundamentally altered, thus
making the tracing out of class history one that needs to refer back to serial generations rather than only to the most recent. As
Yanjie Bian (2002) asserts, the post-1978 reforms under Deng Xiaoping led to an evolving class system,
the effects of which may contribute to the searching out for a different kind of relationship to
social and familial reproduction, and capitalist accumulation by the younger generations. The
composition of this labour force must be seen from within this history, but without negating
present labour conditions that inherently challenge conventional Marxist conceptions of class constitution and the
international division of labour.9 The determined aspiration and idealism – along with cultural
narratives around knowledge, experience and work – that underpins young worker's ‘acceptance’ of
unsatisfactory labour situations must not be necessarily dismissed as a de-politicisation through privilege and elitism. This is not to
deny ongoing inequality, class analysis and conflict in China, especially between rural and metropolitan regions as Pun Ngai and
Chris King-Chi Chan (2008) emphasise. Nor is it to undermine the recognition of a rising elite in such creative and innovative
sectors, to deny the commercial and capital potential in these industries, or to negate the class privilege inherent to education.
Rather it is to acknowledge the wide disparities and complex array of material conditions and wages within the sector that
complicate readings of class formation. Reconsidering Politics and Organisation Widespread and collective labour disputes are still
common in China. The early half of 2010 especially attracted global media attention with high-profile struggles at foreign-owned
factories in China's southeast provinces, for instance the suicides at consumer electronics factories such as Foxconn, and strikes at
Honda auto plants. As Ngai and King-Chi Chan (2008), Ngai and Huilin (2010), and Ching Kwan Lee (2007) have shown, labour
unrest is particularly strong in manufacturing, textile and agricultural industries with a large
rural migrant workforce. This is the face of migrant determination most visibly associated with worker organisation. In
the creative techno-social fields, however, there is little political volatility, which makes it understandable
that scholars concentrate on the more established registers of political articulation by the exploited working and peasant classes than
the seemingly manageable conditions of ‘middle-class’ creative workers. Given the ostensible lack of self-organisation
within the creative fields in Shanghai, once described to me as a politically conservative
wasteland, why is it interesting to speak about young workers in these fields when there are
more prolific and obvious sites of contestation elsewhere? To my mind there are two primary reasons. First, if,
as the Transit Labour project does, we take into account the chains of labour feeding into and fed into by the creative sectors, we see
a much more complex constellation of labour fields. Second, if we examine actual material conditions, we recognise that a significant
number of these creative workers fall into the 40 per cent of the urban workforce who are ‘self-employed, part-time, temporary and
casual’ and who possess ‘little bargaining power’ (Kwan Lee and Friedman, 2009, p. 22). It is also not surprising that this
workforce, whether in China or elsewhere, confounds the conventional strategies of self-
organisation and hence visibility, a crucial point connecting to Virno's conceptualisations of
radical publics and the ambivalences associated with the capitalisation of the ‘general intellect’.
The challenges confronting self-organisation in these fields in China are not dissimilar to those in
Europe. There is no framework for unionisation in the independent and freelance creative
workforce, and in areas where there is a salaried system, for instance advertising or design, there appears to be minimal desire
for union participation, in part owing to the collusion of trade unions and the Communist government. This lack of framework may
have informed the tone of responses given in Shanghai around the possibilities for collective forms of action. When asked ‘what
would a strike mean to you’ during an interview on the 24 March 2010, Li Wen, a graphic designer and artist, responded, there is
no strike here, so if you are on strike you are like, hey sorry I cannot do that, and you end up probably like the clients say fuck
you there's tonnes of people that we can ask for, so that's the problem I think there's no work unit and those kinds of
concepts here. The fragmentation spoken of by Li was echoed across the interview spectrum.
Similarly this was reflected in the unanimous puzzlement over popular European forms of
occupation and appropriation, which had in the United Kingdom and Germany resurged over the past years within
political creative networks. Another Shanghai-based artist, Huang Zhi, during an interview on 19 March 2010 recounted an event
that had occurred in February 2010 in Beijing, which to him resonated the most with such practices. He explained that a few years
back an artist's village had been established on a long-term contract of 5–10 years. After a period of 1 or 2 years the artists were
served with eviction papers. The artists, having invested much time and energy in the space, refused to leave. The owners responded
by cutting off power and water for 4 months during the winter. The artist was unsure whether many of the artists were actually
inhabiting the premises, but did know that they spent a considerable amount of time there. Through this experience they were, he
said, united. One night around 200 organised thugs came to the premises and attacked the artists. Some of them were badly injured.
One of China's most prolific and outspoken artists Ai Weiwei then organised a march on Tiananmen Square, which was interrupted
by police. The march had the effect, however, that attention was drawn to the crime and the thugs were arrested. The artists were
also compensated in the sense that they received funds to move out of the studios. ‘This’, commented Huang ‘is a protest basically,
it's not a strike right but this is something’. He then went on to talk about a website where artists design logos for
competitive auction, getting paid between 100 and 500 RMB per design. What this illustrated
for him was the combination of fierce individualisation and atomisation, cheap labour and self-
exploitation that nullified the possibilities for collective action on an everyday level. ‘Maybe strike is
not working here’, he concluded, ‘there's no strike concept because they don’t care about strike, but I think it would be great if there
was a service or organisation that can deal with these issues’. From conversations with several creative practitioners in Shanghai, it
seemed that despite, or perhaps because of, the infrastructural degeneration of Beijing's arts scene,
it maintained a greater renown for the kinds of radical assemblages more recognised from a
European perspective. What also became clear was that it was commonly held that Shanghai itself lacked a critical political
consciousness. At the same time, however, some arts practitioners were far more ambivalent. One instigator of the self-organised
creative space Xindanwei – a Shanghai collective ‘workspace’ and meeting place for independent and freelance creative workers
(Xindanwei, 2010) – Ling Ya, pinpointed this so-called political lack as something deeply historical and structural. She highlighted
the problems of a direct translation or comparison with Western systems, stating during our interview on 12 March 2010, I wouldn’t
say that Shanghai is politically indifferent, it's just those people compared to the West are still quite small. I mean this is quite
normal when you have a country that's been censored for a long time and has a planned economy and people don’t really have too
much of a sense of expressing ideas, but it's coming, definitely. If you check twitter you have many followers from Shanghai and
every day they are talking about politics. This consideration is not omitted by Wang though, who also reflects ‘how do we begin
to envision a … discussion of something like creative industries in a country where creative
imagination and content are subjugated to active state surveillance?’ (2004, p. 17). The issue raised
by both Ling and Wang here is central as it lays bare this symbiosis of state, capital and creativity so
prevalent in China and especially in Shanghai, which antagonises Eurocentric vocabularies of
self-valorisation and refusal. The Xindanwei space, for instance, describes itself as self-organised and makes associative
claims to underground activism. At the same time it maintains a biometric access system and defines itself as a social enterprise, a
socially driven organisation that uses market strategies and structures to achieve a social goal. Ling was candid about its operation.
When we asked about the intersections between culture and commerce, she recounted a story
concerning the model of organisation they desired. ‘A meeting’, she told us ‘was held with
supporters of the space to gauge their opinions. Half of the group recommended the discourse
around co-working and collaboration be dropped to limit confusion in favour of positioning the
space as a service or business centre. The other half recognised the ‘competitive advantage’ of the space being its
uniqueness and its distinction from conventional models. ‘This difference’, she continued, ‘is what allows Xindanwei to fill a niche in
the market, because such spaces are almost non-existent in Shanghai and this is why it attracts interesting discussion and debate not
found elsewhere’. The ways in which politics and organisation, as well as subjectivation, are
conceived of and play out in these scenarios speaks directly to the ambivalences at the heart of
Virno's conceptions of the general intellect and the possibilities for radical publics (Virno, 2004). In
China, with its long history of enforced socialism and collectivism, the importation of Western ideals of
collaboration and creativity is a tense one, as our conversations with Chris Connery and Chen Hangfeng edify
(Kanngieser and Zechner, 2010). For Virno the putting to work of creativity and communication, of social
relations, can lead to either servitude or emancipation. For the creative workers we spoke to, perhaps
because of the current permutation of capitalist socialism, the trajectory of ‘opportunism,
cynicism, the desire to take advantage of the occasion in order to prevail over others’ intersects
and infects that of ‘conflict and insubordination, defection and exodus from the present
situation’ (Virno in Costa, 2004). What this means for any engagement with the refrain of ‘what is to be done?’
today is the need for an acute sensitivity to the complexities and gradations in the composition,
strategies and self-conceptualisations of the so-called creative class, especially one with a history
like that in China. Conclusion To emphasise this final conjecture: the majority of creative workers that we spoke to described
themselves as politically engaged. Given the events recounted here, what kinds of social and organisational assemblages are
occurring in these fields? How do these navigate the ambivalences thrown up by the importation of Western labour models and
discourses? The intense capitalisation of social, linguistic and affective relations means self-
organisation and self-governance are mechanisms for both autonomy and complicity. In China
where the state colludes so thoroughly with capital, the scene is even more fraught. If the above
situations sit awkwardly within our formulations of political criticality, do they become void? Where might we see potential in
ambivalence? Is there a way to read aspiration beyond capitalist accumulation? And how might we begin to think of
vocabularies more receptive to agitational, messy, aspirational and individuated gestures that
are both autonomous and complicit? These are but some of the questions that need to be asked
when considering the modes of subjectivation producing, and produced by, China's creative,
knowledge and innovative workers. In asking such questions in this article, I have framed and proposed the
conditions of creative labour in terms of the conflicts and connections that are produced
through, and produce, what has been identified by Virno, Berardi and others as the colonisation
of the social and biopolitical realms by capital and labour. I want to stress this aspect of conflict and
ambivalence. In doing so, I emphasise that rather than fully rest on the point, as Berardi does, that what is inevitable is a depressive
phase, in which ‘hope can only come from suicides’ (2009a, p. 55) we might also consider the less visible or less
recognisable gestures of self-valorisation and opportunistic leverages produced – despite the
spaces of capital – by affective relations, which may require new vocabularies for their
enunciation. What is required are new ways to observe and articulate emerging social and
labour mobilisations from perspectives that accommodate the microcosms of the everyday and that traverse macro-political,
visible, common expressions, paying attention to those sites usually forgotten or dismissed by
political activisms. At the same time, the multiplication of autonomies and complicities through
the multiplication of different kinds of labouring roles and subjects need to be accounted for. So
do the difficulties these entail, for instance the appropriation of self-organisation by capital, and a willing
absorption of technologies of valorisation into all spheres of social and bio-political life.

The impact is a global civil war

Bifo, 16 [Franco Berardi, aka "Bifo," founder of the famous "Radio Alice" in Bologna and an
important figure of the Italian Autonomia Movement, is a writer, media theorist, and media
activist. He currently teaches Social History of the Media at the Accademia di Brera, Milan.,
“The Coming Global Civil War: Is There Any Way Out?,” http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-
coming-global-civil-war-is-there-any-way-out/, //ASherm]
Are we heading into the Third World War? Yes and no: war has been with us for the past fifteen years, it promises to be with us for a
long time, and it threatens to destroy the last remnants of modern civilization. The exacerbation of xenophobia across
the West and the rise of nationalism in countries like France are causes and effects of a looming
war whose sources lie in the past two hundred years of colonial impoverishment and
humiliation of the majority of the world population, not to mention neoliberal competition and
the privatization of everything—including war itself. Pacifism is becoming irrelevant as the conditions of war
become irreversible. How can we oppose war when killers shoot at a peaceful crowd at a concert? War is becoming normal:
the stock exchange no longer reacts to massacres, as its main concern is the looming stagnation
of the world economy. After every armed attack, whether by Islamists or white supremacists, by random murderers or by
well-trained fundamentalist killers, Americans run to buy more weapons. So weapons are not only increasing in the
arsenals of nations, but also in the kitchens and bedrooms of everyday families. A Republican
assemblywoman from Nevada named Michele Fiore recently posted a Christmas family portrait on Facebook. At first glance, it’s like
any other holiday card, with three generations of a family in red shirts and jeans in front of a Christmas tree. Upon closer inspection,
you see that Mrs. Fiore, her adult daughters, their husbands, and even one of her grandchildren are all holding firearms. The
privatization of war is an obvious feature of neoliberal deregulation, and the same paradigm has generated Halliburton and the
Sinaloa Cartel, Blackwater and Daesh. The business of violence is one of the main branches of the global
economy and financial abstraction does not discriminate criminal money from any other kind.
The process of externalization and privatization is now provoking a worldwide civil war that is
feeding itself. According to Nicholas Kristof, “in the last four years more people have died in the United States
from guns (including suicides and accidents) than Americans died in the wars in Korea,
Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq combined.” Are we heading toward a global war? Not exactly: no declarations
of war are being issued, but innumerable combat zones are proliferating. No unified fronts are in
sight, but fragmented micro-conflicts and uncanny alliances with no general strategic vision
abound. “World war” is not the term for this. I would call it fragmentary global civil war. And the fragments are
not converging, because war is everywhere. Now, as US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter claims, “destructive power of greater and
greater magnitude falls into the hands of smaller and smaller groups of human beings.”2 When war is privatized, no
geopolitical order in the world can be imagined, no arrangement among the conflicting religious
tribes can be pursued. No beginning and no end—an endless war, as Bin Laden promised. From the Paradise in which he
certainly dwells, Mr. bin Laden must be looking upon the rise of the Caliphate of Death with a smile: so far, he can easily claim that
the Army of Allah is winning the war. Some American Republicans claim that the killings are related to mental illness. In a way, they
are right. But they misunderstand the causes and the extent of what they label mental illness. Mental illness is not the rare
malady of an isolated dropout, but the widespread consequence of panic, depression,
precariousness, and humiliation: these are the sources of the contemporary global fragmentary
war, and they are spreading everywhere, rooted in the legacy of colonialism and in the frenzy of daily competition. Neoliberal
deregulation has opened the way to a regime of worldwide necro-economy: the all-
encompassing law of competition has canceled out moral prescriptions and legal regulations.
Since its earliest phases, Thatcher’s neoliberal philosophy prescribed war among individuals. Hobbes,
Darwin, and Hayek have all been summoned to conceptualize the end of social civilization, the end of peace. Forget about the
religious or ideological labels of the agents of massive violence, and look at their true nature.
Take the Sinaloa Cartel and Daesh and compare them to Blackwater and Exxon Mobil. They have much
more in common than you may think. Their common goal is to extract the maximum amount of
money from their investments in the most exciting products of the contemporary economy:
terror, horror, and death. Necro-capitalism is the emerging economic order of the world. The narco business is a
pillar of the Mexican economy, and in fact the head of the Sinaloa Cartel, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, was listed by
Fortune magazine as one of the most prominent businessmen of 2012. Why not? After all, he is just a neoliberal
entrepreneur who deals in deregulated kidnappings, drug trafficking, and murder. Like
neoliberal corporations investing money in the ultimate business, the Iraqi-Syrian caliphate and the
Mexican narco army pay salaries to their soldiers, who are necro-proletarians. The narco business
recruits unemployed young men from Monterrey, Sinaloa, and Veracruz. The caliphate recruits young men from the suburbs of
London, Cairo, Tunis, and Paris, then trains them to kidnap and slaughter people at random. Daesh salaries have been estimated to
be as much as one thousand US dollars a month. The group acquires this money from ransom, oil, and taxes imposed on millions of
Sunni people. They deliver a postmodern medievalism, but one that is not at all backwards. On the
contrary, it is an anticipation of the future. In a video released by Dubiq, the advertising agency of the
Islamic State, the rhetoric is the same as any other type of advertising: buy this product and
you’ll be happy.3 Multiple camera angles, slick graphics, slow motion, and even artificial wind give the whole thing a more
dramatic mood: join the cause and you’ll find friends, warmth, and well-being. Jihad is the best therapy for depression. A
message for feeble-minded people, for suffering people craving warmth, virile friendship, belonging. Not so
different from the ads that we see every day in our city streets, only more sincere when it comes to the subject of suicide. Suicide is
crucial in this video: 6,500 current or former US military soldiers commit suicide each year, according to Dubiq. While
Americans die alone in anger and despair, God’s soldiers die eager to meet some seventy virgins waiting
in Paradise to fuck the warriors. Do you remember Yugoslavia? For some time, it was a rather healthy federation of twenty-five
million people. Different ethnic and religious communities coexisted, factories were managed by workers, everybody had a privately
owned house, and nobody suffered from hunger. Then came the International Monetary Fund, the Polish pope pushing Croatians
into religious war against the Orthodox Serbs, and Germany delivering weapons to the fascist Ustaša. In 1990, the United
States cut off all forms of credit to Yugoslavia unless separate elections were held in each state of
the federation within six months. As a consequence, Yugoslavia—no longer able to conduct foreign trade—
was condemned to commercial bankruptcy, which reinforced the divisive tendencies of its states. The US then
funded the individual states to dissolve the federation, also supporting parties and movements
that promoted this process. Meanwhile, Germany shipped arms to Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina. In March
of 1991, fascist organizations in Croatia called for the overthrow of the Socialist government and the expulsion of all Serbs from
Croatia. On March 5, 1991, they attacked the federal army base at Gospić, and civil war began. The extreme right-wing Croatian party
Democratic Union, which used the flag, emblems, and slogans of the pro-Nazi Ustaša party, seized power. Citizenship, property
rights, employment, retirement benefits, and passports were granted only to Croats and to no other ethnic group. Thus, 300,000
Serbs armed themselves and entered the fray with unspeakable brutality. The
destruction of Yugoslavia can be seen
as a return of Hitler’s ghost to the world scene. Ethnic-religious wars caused around 170,000
casualties, as ethnic cleansing was practiced in every area of the federation. After seven years of violence,
a new state order emerged based on a paradigm of ethnic-religious identification, a principle thought to have been extinct after the
end of the Second World War and the defeat of Nazism. Twenty years after the Nazi-neoliberal wars of Yugoslavia, in all those small
nation-states (except perhaps Slovenia) unemployment is rampant, people are impoverished, schools are privatized, and public
infrastructure is in disrepair. Today, the Yugoslavia of the Nineties may well be a blueprint for the
European future: German Ordoliberalism has impoverished social life, depleted public services all over the continent, and
inflicted humiliation on Syriza which has jeopardized the core of European solidarity. The failure to deal with the new wave of
migrants from the East has exposed the political fragility of the European Union, and now fuels a new outburst of fear, racism,
shame, and bad conscience. From the Balkans to Greece, from Libya to Morocco, are the ten million people amassing at these
borders going to be the perpetrators of the next terrorist wave? Or will they be the victims of the next Holocaust? After the
attacks in the center of Paris on Friday, November 13, a nervous French President declared: “The security pact
takes precedence over the stability pact. France is at war.” Bin Laden’s dream has been fulfilled. A small
group of fanatics has provoked fragmentary global civil war. Can it be stopped? In the present condition of
perpetual economic stagnation, emerging markets are crumbling, the European Union is paralyzed
[Debilitated], the promised economic recovery is elusive, and it is hard to foresee an awakening from this
nightmare. The only imaginable way out of this hell is to end financial capitalism, but this does not
seem to be at hand. Nevertheless, this is the only prospect we can pursue in such an obscurantist
time: to create solidarity among the bodies of cognitive workers worldwide, and to build a
techno-poetic platform for the collaboration of cognitive workers for the liberation of knowledge
from both religious and economic dogma. A fragmented front of nationalist parties is gaining the upper hand: they
oppose the euro currency and globalization, and they call for the restoration of national sovereignty. This front has assembled in the
governing coalition of Hungary (which includes Nazis and authoritarian nationalists), in the Italian right-wing of Matteo Salvini, in
the Polish government, in the anti-European British party UKIP, and in the rightist majority of the Bavarian CSU. This anti-euro
front of European forces is converging with Russian nationalism under the authoritarian leadership of Putin and the banner of
national populism and unrelenting Islamophobia. After the humiliation of Syriza, the future of Europe is held captive
by the opposition between financial violence and national violence. In order to grasp the
dynamic that drives the global civil war, we first have to see the relation between the icy wind of
financial abstraction and the reaction of the aggressive body of society separated from its brain.
The icy wind of financial abstraction is instilling in the European soul a sense of desolation that Michel Houellebecq has described in
his books. La soumission (Submission) is a novel about the sadness that emerges from the vanishing of collective desire.
Submission to the Supreme Entity (be it God or the market) is the source of the present gloom,
and the source of the present war. Globalization has brought about the obliteration of modern
universalism: capital flows freely everywhere and the labor market is globally unified, but this has
not led to the free circulation of women and men, nor to the affirmation of universal reason in the world. Rather, the opposite is
happening: as the intellectual energies of society are captured by the network of financial
abstraction, as cognitive labor is subjugated to the abstract law of valorization, and as human
communication is transformed into abstract interaction among disembodied digital agents, the
social body is detached from the general intellect. The subsumption of the general intellect into
the corporate kingdom of abstraction is depriving the living community of intelligence,
understanding, and emotion. And the brainless body reacts—on one side, a huge wave of mental
suffering, and on the other side, the much-advertised cure for depression: fanaticism, fascism, and
war. And at the end, suicide.

The university as a site for radicalism has died, and been resurrected as a form of
semiocapitalist economic education, ideas are no longer organic products of
individuals consciousness, but mechanized and mass produced by neoliberal
economic engagement
Bifo 11 [Franco Berardi, aka “Bifo,” founder of the famous “Radio Alice” in Bologna and an
important figure of the Italian Autonomia Movement, is a writer, media theorist, and media
activist. He currently teaches Social History of the Media at the Accademia di Brera, Milan. “I
Want to Think: POST-U”//ASherm]
While the Japanese tragedy has exposed the poisonous effects of the subjugation of knowledge by
an obsession with capitalist accumulation, we should be able to consider what possibilities
remain available for creating an autonomy for knowledge from capitalism in the future. We should
be able to imagine a pathway for knowledge workers to self-organize, and we should be able to create the institutions, or models for
future institutions, of knowledge production and transmission . The complex mutation of knowledge production
and transmission, and the related transformation—or devastation—of modern institutions of
education, has been a crucial outcome of financial dictatorship in the sphere of semiocapital. Net
Economy Let’s not forget that in the 1990s—when the web prompted a new environment for cognitive
activity, mutating the very methodology of producing and distributing knowledge—many theorists,
technologists, and economists spoke optimistically of a long, inexhaustible economic boom, spreading the idea that collective
intelligence and capitalism were finally allied. This was true in some sense, for the decade was marked by the
widespread proliferation of dot-com enterprises that acted as a space for empowering cognitive
labor, offering a degree of partial self-determination. Cognitive workers, engineers, artists, and scientists could create small,
dynamic structures for communication and common production. But this did not last. The 2000 downturn of the
virtual economy, the dot-com crash that followed, and the simultaneous change in cultural and
political climate triggered a reversal, and a process by which the subjectivity of the general
intellect began to be dismantle. The potency of mental activity came to be separated from the collective body, from the
social circuitry of life. Enslavement In this process of this dismantling, labor has been precarized, living
time has been fractalized, and collective intelligence has been subjugated. European governments’
attack on the educational system is the final blow to the autonomy of knowledge. The
subjectivity of the general intellect is dismantled as a precondition to a much broader
subjugation of the processes of knowledge, to the techno-linguistic enslavement of cognitive
behavior in the sphere of production and consumption. Sensibility The cognitive performance of the precarious
worker must become compatible, fractal, recombinable. Cognitive ability must be detached from
sensibility, from the ability to detect, interpret, and understand signs that cannot be translated into words. The
standardization of the cognitive process involves a digital formatting of the mind, disturbing the
sphere of sensibility, and finally destroying it. University In the transition from the bourgeois era of
industrial capitalism to the digital-financial era of semiocapital, mental energy (cognition) shifts to
become the main force of valorization. This process implies a special kind of incorporation (Marx uses the word
“subsumption”) of mental energy. This incorporation implies a standardization and formatting of the
cognitive body, and bodily meaning and meaningful bodies are erased as a result of this
formatting. A decisive step in this subsumption process comes in replacing the modern
institution of the university with a recombinant system for exploiting knowledge and canceling
its autonomy. Since the 1999 Bologna Charter outlining the European educational system’s transformation within a neoliberal
framework, the autonomy of university and school has been under attack. Reason The concept of
autonomy has a crucial place in the definition of the modern university. It is not only a political
concept—referring to the interdependency of the academic institution—but also an
epistemological concept, referring to the inherent methodology of scientific knowledge and
artistic practice by which each field of knowledge establishes its laws, its conventions, aims, procedures,
verification, and change. During the bourgeois era, the university was based on two pillars: the relation
between intellectuals and the city, and the ethical and political role of reason. The second pillar marked
the autonomy of research and teaching, of the process of discovery, innovation, of the production and transmission of moral,
scientific, and technical acquisitions. As for the first, the bourgeoisie were strongly linked to the territory of their properties and
concerned with their development, and these owners and entrepreneurs understood the autonomy of knowledge to be necessary for
achieving productive results. The long process of emancipation from theocratic dogma deeply influenced
bourgeois culture and identity throughout modern times. Biopolitics The post-bourgeois era came
about through a financialization of the economy and a de-localization of work and information.
In The Birth of Biopolitics, Michel Foucault foresees the process by which neoliberal
transformation would later construct the homo economicus—translating every idea and every
act into economic terms and abolishing the autonomy of knowledge as economy fully takes hold of social
life. I do not believe that an economic science really exists. The neoliberal economy is a technology that exploits
the conceptual toolbox of economic study, transforming life into value and crystallizing time as
capital. This normative technology has progressively acquired a central position in the system of
knowledge and research, with every act of research, teaching, learning, and inventing subjected to economic concerns: Can
it be rented? Does it aid economic growth? Does it answer our corporate financiers’ demands? Reformation The
European educational system’s current process of so-called reform is marked by de-financing, cuts, job
losses, and also by a downsizing of non-rentable disciplinary fields—the so-called humanities—
accompanied by the increased support of capital-intensive fields of research. The leading principle of
this reform is the assertion of the epistemological primacy of the economic sphere. Margins Those who do not recognize
the primacy of the economic principle in the field of education—and who refuse to worship the central
dogma of the neoliberal church and its rules of competition, profitability, and compatibility—are labeled as
skeptics, non-believers, atheists, and subsequently marginalized and expelled. A new process is now
emerging from the margins, from the spaces outside of the jurisdiction of this new order. Self-organization While analyzing
the decomposition of the educational system we inherited, we should be able to detect and
connect the points of cognitarian self-organization that rise from our experiences of conflict,
movement, and processes by which the social body is re-activated—from our experiences of
insurrections. Conflicts and movements have been storming the European university since October 2010, and they will expand
their influence in the coming years. The strategy is not to reinstate the previous public education system,
but rather to create institutions for the self-organization of the general intellect. Some post-
university projects have already been initiated (the international circuit of the Nomad University, for instance) and
a wide range of social groups are implementing processes of self-formation. We want to take part in this
process by building skeptic locales of re-imagination. Skepticism is the non-dogmatic stance that we adopt
against economic dogmatism and neoliberal arrogance. SCEPSI SCEPSI begins with the following premise: no matter what the
European authorities do, Europe is over. The evaporation of social energy, the falling expectations, and
the final meltdown of finance are leading the EU to a total collapse. What is our imagination of
Europe in the very moment of its possible dissolution? Poetry What is the place of art in this game
of reinventing the institution once called a university? Art is the decisive link between conscious
mental activity and sensibility, and also between sensibility and sensitivity. During the last decade, art
has played a crucial role in modeling the perception of a new form of alienation. If we think of
experiences like Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s video works, or Jonathan Franzen’s Corrections, Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, Miranda July’s No One
Belongs Here More Than You and Me and You and Everyone We Know, and 3-Iron by Kim Ki-duk, to name just a few, we can
consider the phenomenology of suffering in the age of the body and the soul’s subjugation to the
rhythm of semiocapital. Reactivating sensibility and sensitivity—the affective and sensuous
understanding of the other—becomes key to a self-organization of collective intelligence. It is a therapeutic
process of its own, a process that Félix Guattari would call simultaneously chaosmotic and schizoanalytic.
Poetry is the language of such a therapeutic project. The therapeutic and artistic act of poetry will open a new
space for epistemological autonomy.

In a world where marx t-shirts are produced in sweatshops, our reading of Rilke’s
fifth elegy is the only radical political act left serves as a rupture in the neoliberal
semiotization of language which is able to move beyond meaning and non meaning
and revel in a form of chaosmosis
Bifo 12 [Franco Berardi aka “Bifo,” founder of the famous “Radio Alice” in Bologna and an
important figure of the Italian Autonomia Movement, is a writer, media theorist, and media
activist. He currently teaches Social History of the Media at the Accademia di Brera, Milan. His
last book titled After the Future is published AKpress. “Emancipation of the Sign: Poetry and
Finance During the Twentieth Century”//ASherm]
Money and language have something in common: they are nothing and yet they move everything. They
are nothing but symbols, conventions, flatus vocis, but they have the power to persuade human
beings to act, to work, and to transform physical things: Money makes things happen. It is the source of action
in the world and perhaps the only power we invest in. Perhaps in every other respect, in every other value, bankruptcy has been
declared, giving money the power of some sacred deity, demanding to be recognized. Economics no longer persuades
money to behave. Numbers cannot make the beast lie down and be quiet or sit up and do tricks. Thus, as we suspected
all along, economics falsely imitates science. At best, economics is a neurosis of money, a symptom contrived to
hold the beast in abeyance … Thus economics shares the language of psychopathology, inflation, depression, lows and heights,
slumps and peaks, investments and losses, and economy remains caught in manipulations of acting
stimulated or depressed, drawing attention to itself, egotistically unaware of its own soul.
Economists, brokers, accountants, financiers, all assisted by lawyers, are the priests of the cult of
money, reciting their prayers to make the power of money work without imagination.1 Financial
capitalism is based on the autonomization of the dynamics of money, but more deeply, on the autonomization of value production
from the physical interaction of things. The passage from the industrial abstraction of work to the digital abstraction of world
implies an immaterialization of the labor process. Jean Baudrillard proposed a general semiology of simulation
based on the premise of the end of referentiality, in the economic as well as the linguistic field. In
Le miroir de la production (1973), Baudrillard writes: “In this sense need, use value and the referent ‘do not exist.’
They are only concepts produced and projected into a generic dimension by the development of
the very system of exchange value.”2 The process of the autonomization of money is a particular
aspect of this general trend, but it also has a long history, according to Marc Shell in Money,
Language, and Thought: Between the electrum money of ancient Lydia and the electric money of
contemporary America there occurred a historically momentous change. The exchange value of the
earliest coins derived wholly from the material substance (electrum) of the ingots of which the coins were made and not from the
inscriptions stamped into these ingots. The eventual development of coins whose politically authorized
inscriptions were inadequate to the weights and purities of the ingots into which the inscriptions
were stamped precipitated awareness about the relationship between face value (intellectual currency)
and substantial value (material currency). This difference between inscription and thing grew greater with the introduction
of paper moneys. Paper, the material substance on which the inscriptions were printed, was supposed to make no difference in
exchange, and metal or electrum, the material substance to which the inscriptions referred, was connected with those inscriptions in
increasingly abstract ways. With the advent of electronic fund-transfers the link between inscription and substance was broken. The
matter of electric money does not matter.3 The dephysicalization of money is part of the general process of
abstraction, which is the all-encompassing tendency of capitalism. Marx’s theory of value is based on the
concept of abstract work: because it is the source and the measure of value, work has to sever its relation to the concrete usefulness
of its activity and product. From the point of view of valorization, concrete usefulness does not matter.
In a similar vein, Baudrillard speaks of the relation between signification and language. The
abstraction process at the core of the capitalist capture (subsumption) of work implies abstraction
from the need for the concreteness of products: the referent is erased. The rational, referential,
historical and functional machines of consciousness correspond to industrial machines. The
aleatory, nonreferential, transferential, indeterminate and floating machines of the unconscious respond to the aleatory machines of
the code … The systemic strategy is merely to invoke a number of floating values in this hyperreality. This is as true of the
unconscious as it is of money and theories. Value rules according to the indiscernible order of generation by
means of models, according to the infinite chains of simulation.4 The crucial point of Baudrillard’s critique is
the end of referentiality and the (in)determination of value. In the sphere of the market, things
are not considered from the point of view of their concrete usefulness, but from that of their
exchangeability. Similarly, in the sphere of communication, language is traded and valued according to how
it performs. 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. Retracing the process of dereferentialization in both semiotics and economics, Baudrillard speaks of
the emancipation of the sign: A revolution has put an end to this classical economics of value, a
revolution of value itself, which carries value beyond its commodity form into its radical form.
This revolution consists in the dislocation of the two aspects of the law of value, which were thought to be coherent and eternally
bound as if by a natural law. Referential value is annihilated, giving the structural play of value the
upper hand. The structural dimension becomes autonomous by excluding the referential
dimension, and is instituted upon the death of reference … from now on signs are exchanged against each other
rather than against the real (it is not that they just happen to be exchanged against each other, they do so on condition that they are
no longer exchanged against the real). The emancipation of the sign.5 The emancipation of the sign from its
referential function may be seen as the general trend of late modernity, the prevailing tendency
in literature and art as well as in science and politics. Symbolism opened a new space for poetic praxis, starting
from the emancipation of the word from its referential task. The emancipation of money—the financial sign—
from the industrial production of things follows the same semiotic procedure, from referential to
non-referential signification. But the analogy between economy and language should not
mislead us: although money and language have something in common, their destinies do not
coincide, as language exceeds economic exchange. Poetry is the language of non-
exchangeability, the return of infinite hermeneutics, and the return of the sensuous body of language. I’m talking of poetry
here as an excess of language, as a hidden resource which enables us to shift from one paradigm
to another. Sensibility is the ability to understand what cannot be verbalized, and it has been a victim of the precarization and
fractalization of time. In order to reactivate sensibility, we must gather together art, therapy, and
political action. In the last century, the century that trusted the future, art was essentially
involved in the business of acceleration. Futurism defined the relation between art, the social mind, and social life.
The cult of energy marked the artistic zeitgeist, up to the saturation of collective perception and the paralysis of empathy. Futurist
rhythm was the rhythm of info-acceleration, of violence and war. Now we need retournels that disentangle
singular existence from the social game of competition and productivity: retournels of psychic
and sensitive autonomization, retournels of the singularization and sensibilization of breathing,
unchained from the congested pace of the immaterial assembly line of semiocapitalist
production. 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
semioproduction in the sphere of the market. The eye has taken the central place of human sensory life, but this
ocular domination is a domination of merchandise, of promises that are never fulfilled and
always postponed. In the current conditions of capitalist competition, acceleration is the trigger
for panic, and panic is the premise of depression. Singularity is forgotten, erased, and cancelled in the erotic
domain of semiocapitalism. The singularity of voice and the singularity of words are subjected to the
homogenization of exchange and valorization. Social communication is submitted to techno-
linguistic interfaces. Therefore, in order to exchange meaning in the sphere of connectivity,
conscious organisms have to adapt to the digital environment. In order to accelerate the
circulation of value, meaning is reduced to information, and techno-linguistic devices act as the communicative
matrix. The matrix takes the place of the mother in the generation of language. But language and
information do not overlap, and language cannot be resolved into exchangeability. In Saussure’s parlance, we may say that the
infinity of the parole exceeds the recombinant logic of the langue, such that language can escape
from the matrix and reinvent a social sphere of singular vibrations intermingling and projecting
a new space for sharing, producing, and living. Poetry opens the doors of perception to
singularity. Poetry is language’s excess: poetry is what cannot be reduced to information in
language, what is not exchangeable, what gives way to a new common ground of understanding, of shared meaning—the creation
of a new world. Poetry is a singular vibration of the voice. This vibration can create resonances, and
resonances can produce common space, the place where: lovers, who never Could achieve
fulfillment here, could show Their bold lofty figures of heart-swings, Their towers of ecstasy. The following verses
from Rilke’s “Fifth Elegy” can be read simultaneously as a metaphor for the condition of
precarity, and as an annunciation of a place that we don’t know, that we have never experienced: a place of
the city—a square, a street, an apartment—where lovers, who here (in the kingdom of valorization and exchange) never “could
achieve fulfillment,” suddenly toss their last ever-hoarded, ever-hidden, unknown to us, eternally valid coins of happiness: But tell
me, who are these vagrants, these even a little more transitory than we, these from the start violently wrung (and for whose sake?) by
a never-appeasable will? But it wrings them, bends them, slings them and swings them, throws them and catches them; as if from an
oily, more slippery air they come down on the carpet worn thinner by their eternal leaping, this carpet lost in the universe. Stuck
there like a plaster, as if the sky Of the suburb had hurt the earth.6 There is no secret meaning in these words, but
we can read in them a description of the frail architectures of collective happiness : “pyramids
that long since, where there was no standing-ground, were tremblingly propped together.”7 This place we
don’t know is the place we are looking for, in a social environment that has been impoverished by social
precariousness, in a landscape that has been desertified. It is the place that will be able to warm the
sensible sphere that has been deprived of the joy of singularity. It is the place of occupation, where
movements are gathering: Tahrir Square in Cairo, Puerta del Sol in Madrid, and Zuccotti Park in New York
City. We call poetry the semiotic concatenation that exceeds the sphere of exchange and the
codified correspondence of the signifier and signified; it creates new pathways of signification,
and opens the way to a reactivation of the relation between sensibility and time, as sensibility is
the faculty that makes possible the singularity of the enunciation. Viktor Shklovsky, the Russian formalist
theorist, says that the specificity of literary language lies in its ability to treat words according to an
unrepeatable singular procedure. He calls this procedure priem in Russian. It is an artificial treatment of
verbal matter generating effects of meaning never seen and codified before. This poetical procedure is a
form of estrangement (ostranenie in Russian) that carries the word far away from its common use. “Art is not chaos,” say
Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy? It is rather “a composition of chaos: chaosmos.”8 The relation between
the organism and the environment is disturbed by the acceleration of info-stimuli in the
infosphere, by semiotic inflation, and by the saturation of attention and the conscious sensitive
sphere of subjectivity. Art is the recording and detecting of this dissonance—and the simultaneously creation of the aesthetic
conditions for the perception and expression of new modes of becoming. Relative to schizoanalysis, art acts in two ways: it
diagnoses the infospheric pollution of the psychosphere, but it also provides treatment to the
disturbed organism. The retournel is the sensitive niche where we can create a cosmos that elaborates chaos. Social
movements can be described as a form of retournel: movements are the retournel of
singularization, as they act to create spheres of singularity on the aesthetic and existential levels .
In the process of singularization that the movement makes possible, production, need, and consumption can be semiotized again,
according to a new system of world expectations. 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.
Insurrection is a retournel helping to withdraw the psychic energies of society from the
standardized rhythm of compulsory competition-consumerism and to create an autonomous
collective sphere. Poetry is the language of the movement as it tries to deploy a new retournel. In
the chapter of Chaosmosis on the aesthetic paradigm, Guattari speaks of the new modes of submission and
standardization that subjectivity undergoes—modes produced by network technologies and
neoliberal globalization. Simultaneously, he tries to find new pathways of autonomous subjectivation. Regarding the
first side of the problem, he writes: Subjectivity is standardized through a communication which
evacuates as much as possible trans-semiotic and amodal enunciative compositions. Thus it
slips towards the progressive effacement of polysemy, prosody, gesture, mimicry and posture, to
the profit of a language rigorously subjected to scriptural machines and their mass media avatars. In its extreme
contemporary forms it amounts to an exchange of information tokens calculable as bits and
reproducible on computers … In this type of deterritorialized assemblage, the capitalist Signifier,
as simulacrum of the imaginary of power, has the job of overcoding all the other Universes of
value.9 Digital technology cancels the singular enunciative composition of polysemy, gesture,
and voice, and tends to produce a language that is subjected to linguistic machinery. While
analyzing the standardization of language, Guattari simultaneously looks for a line of escape from
informational submission (assujettissement): An initial chaosmic folding consists in making the powers of
chaos co-exist with those of the highest complexity. It is by a continuous coming-and-going at an
infinite speed that the multiplicities of entities differentiate into ontologically heterogeneous
complexions and become chaotized in abolishing their figural diversity and by homogenizing themselves
within the same being-non-being. In a way, they never stop diving into an umbilical chaotic zone where they lose their
extrinsic references and coordinates, but from where they can re-emerge invested with new charges of complexity. It is during
this chaosmic folding that an interface is installed—an interface between the sensible finitude of
existential Territories and the trans-sensible infinitude of the Universes of reference bound to
them. Thus one oscillates, on one hand, between a finite world of reduced speed, where limits
always loom up behind limits, constraints behind constraints, systems of coordinates behind other systems of
coordinates, without ever arriving at the ultimate tangent of a being-matter which recedes
everywhere and, on the other hand, Universes of infinite speed where being can’t be denied
anymore, where it gives itself in its intrinsic differences, in its heterogenetic qualities. The machine,
every species of machine, is always at the junction of the finite and infinite, at this point of negotiation between complexity and
chaos.10 Guattari here questions the relation between the finite and the infinite in the sphere of
language. He maps the territory of the informational rhizome that was not yet completely
discovered when Chaosmosis was written. The ambiguity of the info-rhizomatic territory is crystal clear: info-
technology standardizes subjectivity and language, inscribing techno-linguistic interfaces that
automatize enunciation. We are tracing here the dynamic of a disaster, the disaster that
capitalism is inserting into hypermodern subjectivity, the disaster of acceleration and panic. But
simultaneously, we have to look for a rhythm that may open a further landscape, a landscape beyond
panic and the precarious affects of loneliness and despair. In the chapter on the aesthetic paradigm in
Chaosmosis, Guattari rethinks the question of singularity in terms of sensitive finitude and the
possible infinity of language. The conscious and sensitive organism, living individuality and 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: To produce new infinities from a submersion in sensible
finitude, infinities not only charged with virtuality but with potentialities actualisable in given situations, circumventing or
dissociating oneself from the Universals itemized by traditional arts, philosophy, and psychoanalysis …a
new love of the unknown …11 The finitude of the conscious and sensitive organism is the place
where we imagine projections of infinity, which are not only virtual but also a potentiality of life,
and which can be actualized in situations. We are on the threshold of a deterritorialized and
rhizomatic world, realizing the anti-oedipal, schizoform dream. However, this dream is becoming
true in the form a global nightmare of financial derealization. On this threshold, we have to imagine a
politics and an ethics of singularity, breaking our ties with expectations of infinite growth, infinite
consumption, and infinite expansion of the self. In the preface to his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein writes: “In
order to draw a limit to thinking we should have to be able to think both sides of this limit (we
should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be thought).”12 And he also writes: The limits of my language mean the limits
of my world. Logic pervades the world: the limits of the world are also its limits. So we cannot say in logic, “The world has this in it,
and this, but not that.” For that would appear to presuppose that we were excluding certain
possibilities, and this cannot be the case, since it would require that logic should go beyond the
limits of the world; for only in that way could it view those limits from the other side as well. We
cannot think what we cannot think; so what we cannot think we cannot say either.13 And finally, he writes: “The subject does
not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world.” When Wittgenstein says that the limits
of language are the limits of the world, this should be read in two ways. First, he is saying that what we
cannot say we cannot do, we cannot experience, we cannot live, because only in the sphere of
language can we interact with the reality of Being. But he is also saying that because the world is what
resides within the limits of our language, what therefore lies beyond the limits of language will
only be experienced once our language is able to elaborate the sphere of Being that lies beyond
the present limit. In fact, Wittgenstein writes: “The subject does not belong to the world, rather it is a limit of the world.”14The
potency and extension of language depends on the consistency of the subject, on its vision, its situation. And the extension of
my world depends on the potency of my language. Guattari calls the process of going beyond the
limits of the world “resemiotization”—the redefinition of the semiotic limit, which is
simultaneously the limit of what can be experienced. Scientists call this effect of autopoietic morphogenesis
“emergence”: a new form emerges and takes shape when logical linguistic conditions make it possible to see and name it. Let’s try to
understand our present situation from this point of view. Digital financial capitalism has created a closed
reality, which cannot be overcome using the techniques of politics—of conscious organized voluntary action
and government. Only an act of language can allow us to see and create a new human condition,
where we now see only barbarianism and violence. Only an act of language that escapes the
technical automatisms of financial capitalism will enable the emergence of a new form of life.
This form of life will be the social and pulsional body of the general intellect, a body which is
suppressed by the present conditions of financial dictatorship. Only the reactivation of the body of
the general intellect—the organic, existential, and historical finitude that embodies the potency
of the general intellect—will allow us to imagine new infinities. At the intersection of the finite and infinite,
the point of negotiation between complexity and chaos, it will be possible to untangle a degree of
complexity greater than the one financial capitalism manages and elaborates. Language has an
infinite potency, but the exercise of language happens in 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 establishment of a limit. But infinity remains immeasurable. Poetry
is the reopening of the indefinite, the ironic act of exceeding the established meaning of words. In
every sphere of human action, grammar is the establishment of limits that define a space of
communication. Today, the economy is the universal grammar traversing the different levels of human activity. Language
is defined and limited by its economic exchangeability. This reduces language to information,
incorporates techno-linguistic automatisms into the social circulation of language. Nevertheless,
while social communication is a limited process, language is boundless: its potentiality is not
restricted to the limits of the signified. Poetry is language’s excess, the signifier disentangled
from the limits of the signified. Irony, the ethical form of the excessive power of language, is the infinite game words play
to create, disrupt, and shuffle meaning. A social movement, at the end of the day, should use irony as
semiotic insolvency, as a mechanism to untangle language, behavior, and action from the limits of symbolic
debt.
 1AC (V2)
Political value systems have undergone a shift – the world is no longer shaped by
traditional class systems, and the regulation of physical labor by the bourgeoisie
has been replaced by a self-regulation of cognitive labor, pushing attention span
and sensibility to its limit in social relationships defined by precarity.
Bifo 11 [Franco Berardi, aka “Bifo,” founder of the famous “Radio Alice” in Bologna and an important
figure of the Italian Autonomia Movement, is a writer, media theorist, and media activist. He currently
teaches Social History of the Media at the Accademia di Brera, Milan. “The Future After the End of the
Economy”//ASherm]
It is the end of summer 2011 and the economic newspapers increasingly warn that there will be a double dip. Economists predict a new
recession before there can be a recovery. I think they are wrong. There will be a recession—on that I agree—but there will be
no more recoveries, no return to the process of constant economic growth. To say this in public would be to invite
accusations of being a traitor, a cynic, a doomsayer. Economists will condemn you as a villain. But economists are not people of
wisdom, and I do not even consider them scientists. They are more like priests, denouncing the bad behavior of
society, asking you to repent for your debts, threatening inflation and misery for your sins, worshipping the dogmas of growth and
competition. What is a science after all? Without embarking on epistemological definitions, I would simply say that science is a form of
knowledge free of dogma, that can extrapolate general laws from the observation of empirical
phenomena, and that can therefore predict something about what will happen next. It also a way of
understanding the types of changes that Thomas Kuhn labeled paradigm shifts. As far as I know, the discourse known as economics does not
correspond to this description. First of all, economists are obsessed with dogmatic notions such as growth, competition, and gross national
product. They profess social reality to be in crisis if it is does not conform to the dictates of these notions. Secondly, economists are incapable
of inferring laws from the observation of reality, as they prefer instead that reality harmonize with their own supposed laws. As a consequence,
they cannot predict anything—and experience has shown this to be the case in the last three or four years. Finally, economists cannot
recognize changes in the social paradigm, and they refuse to adjust their conceptual framework
accordingly. They insist instead that reality must be changed to correspond to their outdated criteria. In the schools of
economics and in business schools they do not teach or learn about physics, chemistry, biology,
astronomy—subjects that deserve to be called sciences, that conceptualize a specific field of reality. Rather, these
schools teach and study a technology, a set of tools, procedures, and pragmatic protocols intended to
twist social reality to serve practical purposes: profits, accumulation, power. Economic reality does not exist. It is the result of
a process of technical modeling, of submission and exploitation. The theoretical discourse that supports this economic
technology can be defined as ideology, in the sense proposed by Marx—who was not an economist, but a critic of
political economy. Ideology is in fact a theoretical technology aimed at advancing special political and social goals. And economic ideology, like
all technologies, is not self-reflexive and therefore cannot develop a theoretical self-understanding. It cannot reframe itself in relation to a
paradigm shift. The development of productive forces, as a global network of cognitive labor that Marx
called the “general intellect,” has provoked an enormous increase in the productive potency of labor.
This potency can no longer be semiotized, organized, and contained by the social form of capitalism.
Capitalism is no longer able to semiotize and organize the social potency of cognitive productivity, because value can no longer be
defined in terms of average necessary work time. Therefore, the old forms of private property and salaried
labor are no longer able to semiotize and organize the deterritorialized nature of capital and social labor.
The shift from the industrial form of production to the semiotic form of production—the shift from physical labor to cognitive
labor—has propelled capitalism out of itself, out of its ideological self-conception. Economists are dazzled by this
transformation, as knowledge that had previously been structured according to the paradigm of bourgeois
capitalism: linear accumulation, measurability of value, private appropriation of surplus value. The
bourgeoisie, which was a territorialized class (the class of the bourg, of the city), was able to manage physical
property and a measurable relation between time and value. The total financialization of capital marks the end of the old
bourgeoisie and opens the door to a deterritorialized and rhizomatic proliferation of economic power relations. Now the old bourgeoisie
no longer has power. They have been replaced by a proliferating virtual class—a deterritorialized and
pulverized social dust rather than a territorialized group of persons—usually referred to as the financial
markets. Labor undergoes a parallel process of pulverization and deterritorialization not only in the loss of a
regular job and a stable income, but in the precarious relationships between worker and territory.
Precarization is an effect of the fragmentation and pulverization of work. The cognitive worker, in fact, does not need to be linked to a place.
His or her activity can be spread in non-physical territory. The old economic categories—salary, private
property, linear growth—no longer make sense in this new situation. The productivity of the general intellect in terms
of use value (i.e., the production of useful semiotic goods) has virtually no limits. So how can semiotic labor be valued if its
products are immaterial? How can the relationship between work and salary be determined? How can
we measure value in terms of time if the productivity of cognitive work (creative, affective, linguistic) cannot be
quantified and standardized? The notion of growth is crucial in the conceptual framework of economic
technology. If social production does not comply with the economic expectations of growth, economists decree that society is sick.
Trembling, they name the disease: recession. This diagnosis has nothing to do with the needs of the population because it does not refer to the
use value of things and semiotic goods, but to abstract capitalist accumulation—accumulation of exchange value. Growth,
in the
economic sense, is not about increasing social happiness and satisfying people’s basic needs. It is about
expanding the global volume of exchange value for the sake of profit. Gross national product, the main
indicator of growth, is not a measure of social welfare and pleasure, but a monetary measure, while social
happiness or unhappiness is generally not dependent on the amount of money circulating in the economy. It is dependent, rather, on
the distribution of wealth and the balance between cultural expectations and the availability of physical
and semiotic goods. Growth is a cultural concept more than an economic criterion for the evaluation of social health and well-being. It is
linked to the modern conception of the future as infinite expansion. For many reasons, infinite expansion has become an impossible task for
the social body. Since the Club of Rome published the book The Limits to Growth in 1972, we have understood that Earth’s natural
resources are limited and that social production has to be redefined according to this knowledge.2 But the
cognitive transformation of production and the creation of a semiocapitalist sphere opened up new
possibilities for expansion. In the 1990s the overall economy expanded euphorically while the net economy was expected to usher
in the prospect of infinite growth. This was a deception. Even if the general intellect is infinitely productive, the limits to
growth are inscribed in the affective body of cognitive work: limits of attention, of psychic energy, of
sensibility. After the illusions of the new economy—spread by the wired neoliberal ideologists—and the deception of the dot-com crash,
the beginning of the new century announced the coming collapse of the financial economy. Since September 2008 we know that,
notwithstanding the financial virtualization of expansion, the end of capitalist growth is in sight. This will be
a curse if social welfare is indeed dependent on the expansion of profits and if we are unable to redefine social needs and expectations. But it
will be a blessing if we can distribute and share existing resources in an egalitarian way, and if we can
shift our cultural expectations in a frugal direction, replacing the idea that pleasure depends on ever-
growing consumption. Modern culture has equated economic expansion with the future, so that for economists, it is impossible to
consider the future independently of economic growth. But this identification has to be abandoned and the concept of
the future rethought. The economic mind cannot make the jump to this new dimension, it cannot
understand this paradigm shift. This is why the economy is in crisis and why economic wisdom cannot cope with the new reality.
The financial semiotization of the economy is a war machine that daily destroys social resources and
intellectual skills. Look at what is happening in Europe. After centuries of industrial production the European continent is
rich, with millions of technicians, poets, doctors, inventors, specialized factory workers, nuclear engineers, and so forth. So how did we
suddenly become so poor? Something very simple happened. The entirety of the wealth that workers produced was
poured into the strongboxes of a minuscule minority of exploiters and speculators. The whole
mechanism of the European financial crisis is oriented towards the most extraordinary displacement of
wealth in history: from society towards the financial class, towards financial capitalism. The wealth produced by the
collective intelligence has been siphoned off and expropriated, leading to the impoverishment of the
richest places in the world and the creation of a financial machine that destroys use value and displaces
monetary wealth. Recession is the economic way of semiotizing the present contradiction between the productive potency of the
general intellect and its financial constraints. 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 is not easy to identify
financial capitalists as individual persons, just as finance is not the monetary counterpart of a certain
number of physical goods. Rather, it is an effect of language. It is the transversal function of
immaterialization and the performative action of indexicality—statistics, figures, indexes, fears, and
expectations are not linguistic representations of some economic referent that can be found
somewhere in the physical world, as signifiers referring to a signified. They are performative acts of speech producing
immediate effects in the very instant of their enunciation. This is why, when you try to seek out the financial class, you
cannot talk with someone, negotiate, or fight against an enemy. There are no enemies, no persons with
whom to negotiate. There are only mathematical implications, automatic social concatenations that one cannot dismantle, or even
avoid. Finance seems inhumane and pitiless because it is not human and therefore has no pity. It can be defined as a mathematical cancer
traversing a large part of society. Those who are involved in the financial game are far more numerous than the personal owners of the old
bourgeoisie. Often unwittingly and unwillingly, people have been dragged into investing their money and their future
in the financial game. Those who have invested their pensions in private funds, those who have signed
mortgages half-consciously, those who have fallen into the trap of easy credit have become part of the
transversal function of finance. They are poor people, workers, and pensioners whose futures depend on the fluctuations of a stock
market they do not control or fully understand. Only if we are able to disentangle the future (the perception of the future, the
concept of the future, and the very production of the future) from the traps of growth and investment will we find a way
out of the vicious subjugation of life, wealth, and pleasure to the financial abstraction of semiocapital.
The key to this disentanglement can be found in a new form of wisdom: harmonizing with exhaustion.
Exhaustion is a cursed word in the frame of modern culture, which is based on the cult of energy and the cult of male aggressiveness. But
energy is fading in the postmodern world for many reasons that are easy to detect. Demographic trends reveal that, as life expectancy
increases and birth rate decreases, mankind as a whole is growing old. This process of general aging produces a sense of
exhaustion, and what was once considered a blessing—increased life expectancy—may become a misfortune if
the myth of energy is not restrained and replaced with a myth of solidarity and compassion. Energy is
fading also because basic physical resources such as oil are doomed to extinction or dramatic depletion.
And energy is fading because competition is stupid in the age of the general intellect. The general intellect is not based on
juvenile impulse and male aggressiveness, on fighting, winning, and appropriation. It is based on
cooperation and sharing. This is why the future is over. We are living in a space that is beyond the
future. If we come to terms with this post-futuristic condition, we can renounce accumulation and growth and be
happy sharing the wealth that comes from past industrial labor and present collective intelligence. If we
cannot do this, we are doomed to live in a century of violence, misery, and war

This shift is especially evident in the context of Chinese development as language

and empathy undergo a process of becoming-labor and young people in creative
industries fall into political and social disarray. The unique symbiosis of
capitalism and socialism in a trajectory of growth distinct from Western economic
systems has laid the foundation for the self-exploitation of millions of creative
laborers.
Kanngeiser 12 [Anja Kanngeiser is a professor of social geography at goldsmiths university “Creative
labour in Shanghai: Questions on politics, composition and ambivalence”//ASherm]
Despite stringent censorship on internet communications by the state, the access to pirated software, peer 2 peer and social networking sites played a large role in
the explosion of the creative fields, not only in the distributive capacities for creative talent and marketing, but also in the production, circulation and consumption
of creative subcultural life worlds, for instance the independent music and arts, design and fashion industries.7 This is hardly surprising given the extent to which
social networking and online sites function as digital platforms for the constitution of different civil and public communities in China, as both Shubo Li (2010) and
Zixue Tai (2006) have argued. According to Lisa Li and Zafka Zhang writing on the blog China Youth Watch, which sells itself as ‘catching the pulse of China youth’,
China sees not only a growing supply of creative products/contents but also a huge size of creativity-
seekers in the young generation. There's the saying all the artistic youth in China gather on Douban. Whatever ‘cool stuff’ you are talking about,
you are assured to find at least one group on it. (2008)8 Obviously there are commonalities in the commodification of social
labour regardless of its sites of articulation. Whether in Asia or Europe what is primarily capitalised upon is artistic
innovation in the form of imaginative and affective relationalities. This is what drives consumer
desire, made visible through social networks and communicative faculties – the becoming labour of language and empathy, as we
have seen (Virno, 2004; Berardi, 2009a, 2009b). Michael Keane has noted, however, that while creative fields in the West are
imbued with histories and fantasies of the liberated artist and the transcendence of aesthetics,
this is not the case in China (2009). Furthermore, as Wang points out, peculiar also to the development of the cultural
and creative fields in China is an intense symbiosis of state and corporate apparatuses (2004). The tension
between, on the one hand, mass collective labour and economic expansion and on the other, individuation and
self-expression, is also worthy of note given the historical conditions of Chinese socialist labour regimes.
These aspects grate against European understandings of creative labour, and antagonise any easy translation of political vocabularies trans-contextually. Within
China, Shanghai is claimed to have ‘by far the most ambitious creative industries programme’ and as ‘the most
“Western” city in China on its own admission, is thus set to take the lead in the creative industries’ (O’Conner and Xin, 2006, p. 281). As Li Wu Wei and Hua Jian
propose, the potential for the creative industries in Shanghai is particularly high for a number of reasons: first, its pre-existing industry infrastructure; second, its
‘historical industrial heritage’ (2006, p. 168); third, its cultural diversity and mix of Eastern and Western influences; and fourth, its desirability to ‘talent’ boosted by
China's ‘open door policy’ (ibid.). Unique to Shanghai is also
a distinctive combination of ‘industrial clustering, government
agency promotion, and policy support’ (ibid.). The impact of the creative markets has been most clearly
evinced by the sharp increase in arts infrastructures: according to a UNESCO report, Shanghai now features the largest territory of
creative clusters worldwide, with over 6110 creative enterprises originating from more than 30 countries and regions, employing over 114 700 people (2011). By the
end of 2010 the creative industries were expected to be generating around 10 per cent of Shanghai's GDP (Yu, 2007). Given this staggering escalation of the field
what is of interest are the new kinds of social assemblages arising from these recent
since its 2005 inception,
labour constellations, and the modes of organisation and regulation that they have engendered. The
social and class assemblages and subjectivities arising from Shanghai's new creative sector are complex, and
there is an uneven distribution of labour, despite a propensity to label creative workers as the burgeoning elite class. First, this is because of
the wide array of work and working conditions that fall under the category of ‘creative’ in China. As Zhang (2007) shows, this ranges from advertising, IT, media and
science research to hairdressing, agriculture and textiles. Second, the supply chains consolidating these industries are also imperative to acknowledge. As the Transit
Labour project illustrates, this includes the processing and assemblage of raw materials and components, traditionally factory labour, to waste collection and
recycling, comprised of both formal and informal economies and structures. The inclusion of service labour to this category is also imperative. This is what troubles
any meta-analysis of the economic and social composition of the living labour that populates innovation and creative work. Two contrasting perspectives seem to
dominate – common to both is an aspirationalist desire. This can be both de-politicising and politicising in unconventional ways, as will later be discussed. On the
one hand, as Jing Wang comments, the rising ‘creative class’ … have deep pockets, networking capital with the state, and a lifestyle characteristic of the nouveau
riche. Totally indifferent to public issues concerning the truly socially dislocated (i.e. rural migrants) those twenty- and thirty-somethings are a species that even the
A
most enthusiastic advocates of creative industries would find difficult to romanticize. (2004, p. 17) The stereotype identified by Wang is certainly not exceptional.
brief scan of online materials cites the same glamorous, vertiginously successful lifestyle criticised by
Wang (Chen, 2007; Keenlyside, 2008; Fringe Shanghai, 2010; Tian, 2010). What must be acknowledged with regard to this
stereotype, furthermore, is its connection to the expatriate community, which comprises in large part
the management hierarchy and contributes to the unevenness in labour and economic distribution. The
influx of Western and more broadly transnational businesses and entrepreneurs, and the workforce comprising the
professional classes, impacts the shaping of aspirations of young people for hyper-consumer capitalist
culture. On the other hand, a number of the young Chinese creatives we spoke with described their background, and those of their friends and peers, as
working or middle class, often migrating from rural territories either with their families or alone for the pursuance of higher education. This is obviously not to
suggest that all of those within the creative sectors come from working-class demographics, but simply to note that each industry contains diversities that cannot be
easily homogenised. Many of the young workers we spoke to articulated a struggle within the job market, both
their own and their peers, and an apprehension around future job security. On a national scale, this
seeming precariousness is supported by the growing awareness (Agencies, 2010; Crowley, 2010; Jennings, 2010; Madariaga,
2010) of what has been termed ‘ant tribes’: the flexible and low-waged aggregation of young graduates without job
contracts or social security living in highly condensed diasporas on the metropolitan outskirts. Similarly, there
has been documentation of factory labour in Chinese provinces, such as Dafen, where the manufacture and mass production of aesthetic objects occur (Paetsch,
2006). In a telling gesture one graduate from the prestigious Peking University even posted on the Chinese Ganji (online used goods trading website) ‘I am willing to
sell my Peking University diploma for one yuan’. According to Paolo Do, this was because since 2003 the graduate had not found employment paying more than
1500 yuan per month, less than that offered for much unqualified work (2010). From these contrasting perspectives it is hardly surprising that Pang cautions that it
is necessary to address the complexities within the constituencies of the creative fields and to understand such complexity as ‘politically confounding because it
constantly incorporates and interjects different kinds of labor and different ways of thinking, although it also means that workers are exposed to exploitation on
different fronts’ (2009, p. 72). The
composition of this workforce from a socio-economic standpoint is even more
layered when one takes into account China's national history over the latter half of the twentieth
century. Chris Connery proposed during an interview on 3 August 2010 that the broad sweep of Chairman Mao's cultural revolution and the attempted
rehabilitation of the bourgeoisie meant that class composition was fundamentally altered, thus making the tracing out of class history one that needs to refer back
to serial generations rather than only to the most recent. As Yanjie Bian (2002) asserts, the post-1978
reforms under Deng Xiaoping led to
an evolving class system, the effects of which may contribute to the searching out for a different kind of
relationship to social and familial reproduction, and capitalist accumulation by the younger generations.
The composition of this labour force must be seen from within this history, but without negating present
labour conditions that inherently challenge conventional Marxist conceptions of class
constitution and the international division of labour.9 The determined aspiration and idealism –
along with cultural narratives around knowledge, experience and work – that underpins young worker's ‘acceptance’ of
unsatisfactory labour situations must not be necessarily dismissed as a de-politicisation through privilege and elitism. This is not to deny ongoing inequality, class
analysis and conflict in China, especially between rural and metropolitan regions as Pun Ngai and Chris King-Chi Chan (2008) emphasise. Nor is it to undermine the
recognition of a rising elite in such creative and innovative sectors, to deny the commercial and capital potential in these industries, or to negate the class privilege
inherent to education. Rather it is to acknowledge the wide disparities and complex array of material conditions and wages within the sector that complicate
readings of class formation. Reconsidering Politics and Organisation Widespread and collective labour disputes are still common in China. The early half of 2010
especially attracted global media attention with high-profile struggles at foreign-owned factories in China's southeast provinces, for instance the suicides at
consumer electronics factories such as Foxconn, and strikes at Honda auto plants. As Ngai and King-Chi Chan (2008), Ngai and Huilin (2010), and Ching Kwan Lee
(2007) have shown, labour
unrest is particularly strong in manufacturing, textile and agricultural industries with
a large rural migrant workforce. This is the face of migrant determination most visibly associated with worker organisation. In the creative
techno-social fields, however, there is little political volatility, which makes it understandable that scholars concentrate on the
more established registers of political articulation by the exploited working and peasant classes than the seemingly manageable conditions of ‘middle-class’ creative
workers. Given
the ostensible lack of self-organisation within the creative fields in Shanghai, once described to
me as a politically conservative wasteland, why is it interesting to speak about young workers in these
fields when there are more prolific and obvious sites of contestation elsewhere? To my mind there are two primary
reasons. First, if, as the Transit Labour project does, we take into account the chains of labour feeding into and fed into by the creative sectors, we see a much more
complex constellation of labour fields. Second, if we examine actual material conditions, we recognise that a significant number of these creative workers fall into
the 40 per cent of the urban workforce who are ‘self-employed, part-time, temporary and casual’ and who possess ‘little bargaining power’ (Kwan Lee and
Friedman, 2009, p. 22). It is also not surprising that this
workforce, whether in China or elsewhere, confounds the
conventional strategies of self-organisation and hence visibility, a crucial point connecting to Virno's
conceptualisations of radical publics and the ambivalences associated with the capitalisation of the
‘general intellect’. The challenges confronting self-organisation in these fields in China are not dissimilar to those
in Europe. There is no framework for unionisation in the independent and freelance creative workforce,
and in areas where there is a salaried system, for instance advertising or design, there appears to be minimal desire for union participation, in part owing to the
collusion of trade unions and the Communist government. This lack of framework may have informed the tone of responses given in Shanghai around the
possibilities for collective forms of action. When asked ‘what would a strike mean to you’ during an interview on the 24 March 2010, Li Wen, a graphic designer and
artist, responded, there is no strike here, so if you are on strike you are like, hey sorry I cannot do that, and you end up probably like the clients say fuck
you there's tonnes of people that we can ask for, so that's the problem I think there's no work unit and those kinds of concepts here.
The fragmentation spoken of by Li was echoed across the interview spectrum. Similarly this was reflected in
the unanimous puzzlement over popular European forms of occupation and appropriation, which had in the
United Kingdom and Germany resurged over the past years within political creative networks. Another Shanghai-based artist, Huang Zhi, during an interview on 19
March 2010 recounted an event that had occurred in February 2010 in Beijing, which to him resonated the most with such practices. He explained that a few years
back an artist's village had been established on a long-term contract of 5–10 years. After a period of 1 or 2 years the artists were served with eviction papers. The
artists, having invested much time and energy in the space, refused to leave. The owners responded by cutting off power and water for 4 months during the winter.
The artist was unsure whether many of the artists were actually inhabiting the premises, but did know that they spent a considerable amount of time there.
Through this experience they were, he said, united. One night around 200 organised thugs came to the premises and attacked the artists. Some of them were badly
injured. One of China's most prolific and outspoken artists Ai Weiwei then organised a march on Tiananmen Square, which was interrupted by police. The march
had the effect, however, that attention was drawn to the crime and the thugs were arrested. The artists were also compensated in the sense that they received
funds to move out of the studios. ‘This’, commented Huang ‘is a protest basically, it's not a strike right but this is something’. He then went on to talk about a
website where artists design logos for competitive auction, getting paid between 100 and 500 RMB per
design. What this illustrated for him was the combination of fierce individualisation and atomisation,
cheap labour and self-exploitation that nullified the possibilities for collective action on an everyday
level. ‘Maybe strike is not working here’, he concluded, ‘there's no strike concept because they don’t care about strike, but I think it would be great if there was a
service or organisation that can deal with these issues’. From conversations with several creative practitioners in Shanghai, it seemed that despite, or
perhaps because of, the infrastructural degeneration of Beijing's arts scene, it maintained a greater
renown for the kinds of radical assemblages more recognised from a European perspective. What also became
clear was that it was commonly held that Shanghai itself lacked a critical political consciousness. At the same time, however, some arts practitioners were far more
ambivalent. One instigator of the self-organised creative space Xindanwei – a Shanghai collective ‘workspace’ and meeting place for independent and freelance
creative workers (Xindanwei, 2010) – Ling Ya, pinpointed this so-called political lack as something deeply historical and structural. She highlighted the problems of a
direct translation or comparison with Western systems, stating during our interview on 12 March 2010, I wouldn’t say that Shanghai is politically indifferent, it's just
those people compared to the West are still quite small. I mean this is quite normal when you have a country that's been censored for a long time and has a planned
economy and people don’t really have too much of a sense of expressing ideas, but it's coming, definitely. If you check twitter you have many followers from
Shanghai and every day they are talking about politics. This consideration is not omitted by Wang though, who also reflects ‘how do we begin to envision a …
discussion of something like creative industries in a country where creative imagination and content are subjugated to active state surveillance?’ (2004,
p. 17). The
issue raised by both Ling and Wang here is central as it lays bare this symbiosis of state, capital and
creativity so prevalent in China and especially in Shanghai, which antagonises Eurocentric vocabularies
of self-valorisation and refusal. The Xindanwei space, for instance, describes itself as self-organised and makes associative claims to underground
activism. At the same time it maintains a biometric access system and defines itself as a social enterprise, a socially driven organisation that uses market strategies
and structures to achieve a social goal. Ling was candid about its operation. When we asked about the intersections between
culture and commerce, she recounted a story concerning the model of organisation they desired. ‘A
meeting’, she told us ‘was held with supporters of the space to gauge their opinions. Half of the group
recommended the discourse around co-working and collaboration be dropped to limit confusion in
favour of positioning the space as a service or business centre. The other half recognised the ‘competitive advantage’ of the
space being its uniqueness and its distinction from conventional models. ‘This difference’, she continued, ‘is what allows Xindanwei to fill a niche in the market,
because such spaces are almost non-existent in Shanghai and this is why it attracts interesting discussion and debate not found elsewhere’. The
ways in
which politics and organisation, as well as subjectivation, are conceived of and play out in these
scenarios speaks directly to the ambivalences at the heart of Virno's conceptions of the general intellect
and the possibilities for radical publics (Virno, 2004). In China, with its long history of enforced socialism and collectivism, the
importation of Western ideals of collaboration and creativity is a tense one, as our conversations with Chris Connery and
Chen Hangfeng edify (Kanngieser and Zechner, 2010). For Virno the putting to work of creativity and communication, of
social relations, can lead to either servitude or emancipation. For the creative workers we spoke to, perhaps
because of the current permutation of capitalist socialism, the trajectory of ‘opportunism, cynicism, the
desire to take advantage of the occasion in order to prevail over others’ intersects and infects that of
‘conflict and insubordination, defection and exodus from the present situation’ (Virno in Costa, 2004). What this
means for any engagement with the refrain of ‘what is to be done?’ today is the need for an acute sensitivity to the
complexities and gradations in the composition, strategies and self-conceptualisations of the so-called
creative class, especially one with a history like that in China. Conclusion To emphasise this final conjecture: the majority of
creative workers that we spoke to described themselves as politically engaged. Given the events recounted here, what kinds of social and organisational
assemblages are occurring in these fields? How do these navigate the ambivalences thrown up by the importation of Western labour models and discourses? The
intense capitalisation of social, linguistic and affective relations means self-organisation and self-
governance are mechanisms for both autonomy and complicity. In China where the state colludes so
thoroughly with capital, the scene is even more fraught. If the above situations sit awkwardly within our formulations of political
criticality, do they become void? Where might we see potential in ambivalence? Is there a way to read aspiration beyond capitalist accumulation? And how
might we begin to think of vocabularies more receptive to agitational, messy, aspirational and
individuated gestures that are both autonomous and complicit? These are but some of the questions
that need to be asked when considering the modes of subjectivation producing, and produced by,
China's creative, knowledge and innovative workers. In asking such questions in this article, I have framed and
proposed the conditions of creative labour in terms of the conflicts and connections that are produced
through, and produce, what has been identified by Virno, Berardi and others as the colonisation of the
social and biopolitical realms by capital and labour. I want to stress this aspect of conflict and ambivalence. In doing so, I emphasise
that rather than fully rest on the point, as Berardi does, that what is inevitable is a depressive phase, in which ‘hope can only come from suicides’ (2009a, p. 55)
we might also consider the less visible or less recognisable gestures of self-valorisation and opportunistic
leverages produced – despite the spaces of capital – by affective relations, which may require new
vocabularies for their enunciation. What is required are new ways to observe and articulate emerging
social and labour mobilisations from perspectives that accommodate the microcosms of the
everyday and that traverse macro-political, visible, common expressions, paying attention to those
sites usually forgotten or dismissed by political activisms. At the same time, the multiplication of
autonomies and complicities through the multiplication of different kinds of labouring roles and subjects
need to be accounted for. So do the difficulties these entail, for instance the appropriation of self-organisation by capital,
and a willing absorption of technologies of valorisation into all spheres of social and bio-political life.

And, the development of precarious systems of cognitive labor has drastic effects
on both interpersonal and global interactions – the drive to globalization is the
source of contemporary global war, and the constant game of catch-up that
cognitive workers must play in the accelerated imagery of the modern world
induces great mental suffering in the form of panic, attention deficit disorder,
anxiety, and depression.
Bifo 16 [Franco Berardi, aka "Bifo," founder of the famous "Radio Alice" in Bologna and an important
figure of the Italian Autonomia Movement, is a writer, media theorist, and media activist. He currently
teaches Social History of the Media at the Accademia di Brera, Milan., “The Coming Global Civil War: Is
There Any Way Out?,” http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-coming-global-civil-war-is-there-any-way-
out/, //ASherm]
Are we heading into the Third World War? Yes and no: war has been with us for the past fifteen years, it promises to be with us for a long time,
and it threatens to destroy the last remnants of modern civilization. The exacerbation of xenophobia across the West and
the rise of nationalism in countries like France are causes and effects of a looming war whose sources lie
in the past two hundred years of colonial impoverishment and humiliation of the majority of the world
population, not to mention neoliberal competition and the privatization of everything—including war
itself. Pacifism is becoming irrelevant as the conditions of war become irreversible. How can we oppose war when killers shoot at a peaceful
crowd at a concert? War is becoming normal: the stock exchange no longer reacts to massacres, as its main
concern is the looming stagnation of the world economy. After every armed attack, whether by Islamists or white
supremacists, by random murderers or by well-trained fundamentalist killers, Americans run to buy more weapons. So weapons are not
only increasing in the arsenals of nations, but also in the kitchens and bedrooms of everyday families. A
Republican assemblywoman from Nevada named Michele Fiore recently posted a Christmas family portrait on Facebook. At first glance, it’s like
any other holiday card, with three generations of a family in red shirts and jeans in front of a Christmas tree. Upon closer inspection, you see
that Mrs. Fiore, her adult daughters, their husbands, and even one of her grandchildren are all holding firearms. The privatization of war is an
obvious feature of neoliberal deregulation, and the same paradigm has generated Halliburton and the Sinaloa Cartel, Blackwater and Daesh.
The business of violence is one of the main branches of the global economy and financial abstraction
does not discriminate criminal money from any other kind. The process of externalization and privatization is
now provoking a worldwide civil war that is feeding itself. According to Nicholas Kristof, “in the last four years more
people have died in the United States from guns (including suicides and accidents) than Americans died
in the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq combined.” Are we heading toward a global war? Not exactly: no
declarations of war are being issued, but innumerable combat zones are proliferating. No unified fronts
are in sight, but fragmented micro-conflicts and uncanny alliances with no general strategic vision
abound. “World war” is not the term for this. I would call it fragmentary global civil war. And the fragments are not
converging, because war is everywhere. Now, as US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter claims, “destructive power of greater and greater
magnitude falls into the hands of smaller and smaller groups of human beings.”2 When
war is privatized, no geopolitical order
in the world can be imagined, no arrangement among the conflicting religious tribes can be pursued. No
beginning and no end—an endless war, as Bin Laden promised. From the Paradise in which he certainly dwells, Mr. bin Laden must be looking
upon the rise of the Caliphate of Death with a smile: so far, he can easily claim that the Army of Allah is winning the war. Some American
Republicans claim that the killings are related to mental illness. In a way, they are right. But they misunderstand the causes and the extent of
what they label mental illness. Mental illness is not the rare malady of an isolated dropout, but the widespread
consequence of panic, depression, precariousness, and humiliation: these are the sources of the
contemporary global fragmentary war, and they are spreading everywhere, rooted in the legacy of colonialism and in the frenzy
of daily competition. Neoliberal deregulation has opened the way to a regime of worldwide necro-economy:
the all-encompassing law of competition has canceled out moral prescriptions and legal regulations. Since
its earliest phases, Thatcher’s neoliberal philosophy prescribed war among individuals. Hobbes, Darwin, and Hayek
have all been summoned to conceptualize the end of social civilization, the end of peace. Forget about the religious or
ideological labels of the agents of massive violence, and look at their true nature. Take the Sinaloa Cartel
and Daesh and compare them to Blackwater and Exxon Mobil. They have much more in common than you may
think. Their common goal is to extract the maximum amount of money from their investments in the
most exciting products of the contemporary economy: terror, horror, and death. Necro-capitalism is the
emerging economic order of the world. The narco business is a pillar of the Mexican economy, and in fact the head of the
Sinaloa Cartel, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, was listed by Fortune magazine as one of the most prominent businessmen of 2012. Why not?
After all, he is just a neoliberal entrepreneur who deals in deregulated kidnappings, drug trafficking, and
murder. Like neoliberal corporations investing money in the ultimate business, the Iraqi-Syrian caliphate and the
Mexican narco army pay salaries to their soldiers, who are necro-proletarians. The narco business recruits
unemployed young men from Monterrey, Sinaloa, and Veracruz. The caliphate recruits young men from the suburbs of London, Cairo, Tunis,
and Paris, then trains them to kidnap and slaughter people at random. Daesh salaries have been estimated to be as much as one thousand US
dollars a month. The group acquires this money from ransom, oil, and taxes imposed on millions of Sunni people. They
deliver a
postmodern medievalism, but one that is not at all backwards. On the contrary, it is an anticipation of
the future. In a video released by Dubiq, the advertising agency of the Islamic State, the rhetoric is the same as
any other type of advertising: buy this product and you’ll be happy.3 Multiple camera angles, slick graphics, slow
motion, and even artificial wind give the whole thing a more dramatic mood: join the cause and you’ll find friends, warmth, and well-being.
Jihad is the best therapy for depression. A message for feeble-minded people, for suffering people craving warmth, virile
friendship, belonging. Not so different from the ads that we see every day in our city streets, only more sincere when it comes to the
subject of suicide. Suicide is crucial in this video: 6,500 current or former US military soldiers commit suicide each year, according to Dubiq.
While Americans die alone in anger and despair, God’s soldiers die eager to meet some seventy virgins waiting in
Paradise to fuck the warriors. Do you remember Yugoslavia? For some time, it was a rather healthy federation of twenty-five million people.
Different ethnic and religious communities coexisted, factories were managed by workers, everybody had a privately owned house, and nobody
suffered from hunger. Then came the International Monetary Fund, the Polish pope pushing Croatians into religious war against the Orthodox
Serbs, and Germany delivering weapons to the fascist Ustaša. In
1990, the United States cut off all forms of credit to
Yugoslavia unless separate elections were held in each state of the federation within six months. As a
consequence, Yugoslavia—no longer able to conduct foreign trade—was condemned to commercial bankruptcy, which reinforced
the divisive tendencies of its states. The US then funded the individual states to dissolve the federation,
also supporting parties and movements that promoted this process. Meanwhile, Germany shipped arms to Slovenia,
Croatia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina. In March of 1991, fascist organizations in Croatia called for the overthrow of the Socialist government and the
expulsion of all Serbs from Croatia. On March 5, 1991, they attacked the federal army base at Gospić, and civil war began. The extreme right-
wing Croatian party Democratic Union, which used the flag, emblems, and slogans of the pro-Nazi Ustaša party, seized power. Citizenship,
property rights, employment, retirement benefits, and passports were granted only to Croats and to no other ethnic group. Thus, 300,000 Serbs
armed themselves and entered the fray with unspeakable brutality. The
destruction of Yugoslavia can be seen as a return
of Hitler’s ghost to the world scene. Ethnic-religious wars caused around 170,000 casualties, as ethnic
cleansing was practiced in every area of the federation. After seven years of violence, a new state order emerged based on
a paradigm of ethnic-religious identification, a principle thought to have been extinct after the end of the Second World War and the defeat of
Nazism. Twenty years after the Nazi-neoliberal wars of Yugoslavia, in all those small nation-states (except perhaps Slovenia) unemployment is
rampant, people are impoverished, schools are privatized, and public infrastructure is in disrepair. Today, the Yugoslavia of the
Nineties may well be a blueprint for the European future: German Ordoliberalism has impoverished social life, depleted
public services all over the continent, and inflicted humiliation on Syriza which has jeopardized the core of European solidarity. The failure to
deal with the new wave of migrants from the East has exposed the political fragility of the European Union, and now fuels a new outburst of
fear, racism, shame, and bad conscience. From the Balkans to Greece, from Libya to Morocco, are the ten million people amassing at these
borders going to be the perpetrators of the next terrorist wave? Or will they be the victims of the next Holocaust? After
the attacks in
the center of Paris on Friday, November 13, a nervous French President declared: “The security pact takes precedence over
the stability pact. France is at war.” Bin Laden’s dream has been fulfilled. A small group of fanatics has
provoked fragmentary global civil war. Can it be stopped? In the present condition of perpetual economic stagnation,
emerging markets are crumbling, the European Union is paralyzed [Debilitated], the promised economic
recovery is elusive, and it is hard to foresee an awakening from this nightmare. The only imaginable way out of this hell is
to end financial capitalism, but this does not seem to be at hand. Nevertheless, this is the only prospect we
can pursue in such an obscurantist time: to create solidarity among the bodies of cognitive workers
worldwide, and to build a techno-poetic platform for the collaboration of cognitive workers for the
liberation of knowledge from both religious and economic dogma. A fragmented front of nationalist parties is gaining
the upper hand: they oppose the euro currency and globalization, and they call for the restoration of national sovereignty. This front has
assembled in the governing coalition of Hungary (which includes Nazis and authoritarian nationalists), in the Italian right-wing of Matteo Salvini,
in the Polish government, in the anti-European British party UKIP, and in the rightist majority of the Bavarian CSU. This anti-euro front of
European forces is converging with Russian nationalism under the authoritarian leadership of Putin and the banner of national populism and
unrelenting Islamophobia. After the humiliation of Syriza, the
future of Europe is held captive by the opposition
between financial violence and national violence. In order to grasp the dynamic that drives the global
civil war, we first have to see the relation between the icy wind of financial abstraction and the reaction
of the aggressive body of society separated from its brain. The icy wind of financial abstraction is instilling in the European
soul a sense of desolation that Michel Houellebecq has described in his books. La soumission (Submission) is a novel about the sadness that
emerges from the vanishing of collective desire. Submission to the Supreme Entity (be it God or the market) is the
source of the present gloom, and the source of the present war. Globalization has brought about the
obliteration of modern universalism: capital flows freely everywhere and the labor market is globally
unified, but this has not led to the free circulation of women and men, nor to the affirmation of universal reason in the world. Rather, the
opposite is happening: as the intellectual energies of society are captured by the network of financial
abstraction, as cognitive labor is subjugated to the abstract law of valorization, and as human
communication is transformed into abstract interaction among disembodied digital agents, the social
body is detached from the general intellect. The subsumption of the general intellect into the corporate
kingdom of abstraction is depriving the living community of intelligence, understanding, and emotion.
And the brainless body reacts—on one side, a huge wave of mental suffering, and on the other side, the
much-advertised cure for depression: fanaticism, fascism, and war. And at the end, suicide.

Affirm chaosmosis, or the neural reframing of existence away from accelerationist

evolution and political will in favor of rhythmic engagement – this is necessary to
overcome the automatization of social life and to reconstruct empathetic
understanding, and is a prerequisite to any understanding of economic
engagement policy.
Bifo 15 [Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Professor of Social History of Communication at the Accademia di Belle Arti of Milan, "Heroes:
Mass Murder and Suicide", Verso 2015, pg. 216-222]
While info-technologies are provoking an acceleration of the rhythm of information and experience,
simultaneously the space for physical movement is shrinking and the resources for economic expansion
are becoming exhausted. I call this double process of acceleration and exhaustion: the spasm. A spasm is
a sudden, abnormal, involuntary muscular contraction, or a series of alternating muscular contractions
and relaxations. A spasm is also a sudden, brief spell of energy and an abnormal, painful intensification
of the bodily nervous vibration. In his book Spasm (1993), Arthur Kroker speaks of cyberpunk aesthetics and of partitioned
recombinant bodies, in order to describe the effects of info-technology on the body-machine. According to Kroker, the introduction of
electronic devices in the flesh of the organic body (prostheses, pharmacology) and in the space between organic
bodies (digital enhancement of the bodily interaction, advertising, virtual sex) is the cause of an acceleration of the nervous
vibration up to the point of spasm. In Guattari’s parlance a refrain (retournelle) is the link between the subject of
enunciation and the cosmos, between a body and the surrounding environment, between the
consciousness of a social group and its physical and imaginary territory. Deterritorialization breaks the
chains, and jeopardizes the relation between subjectivity and its environment. As a reaction, the refrain
tends to harden, to become stiff in order to dam the process of deterritorialization. In the case of neurotic
identity the refrain is embodied in hardened representations, as an obsessional ritual or an aggressive reaction to change. In the current
anthropological mutation induced by digital info-technology and market globalization, the
social organism is subjected to an
accelerated deterritorialization that takes the form of a spasm. In his last book, Chaosmosis (1992), Guattari writes that
‘Among the fogs and miasmas which obscure our fin de millenaire, the question of subjectivity is now returning as a leit motiv . . .’ He first adds:
‘Allthe disciplines will have to combine their creativity to ward off the ordeals of barbarism, the mental
implosion and chaosmic spasms looming on the horizon.’ Then he writes: ‘We have to conjure barbarianism,
mental implosion, chaosmic spasm’.2 This last expression marks the consciousness of the darkness, and
of the pathology that capitalism is bringing about. In that book Guattari foretold that the millennial transition was
going to be an age of fog and miasmas, of obscurity and suffering. Now we know that he was perfectly
right. Twenty years after Chaosmosis, we know that the fog is thicker than ever and that the miasmas
are not vanishing, but becoming more dangerous, more poisonous than they have ever been. Chaosmosis
was published just a few months before the death of its author in 1992, when the world powers met in Rio de Janeiro to discuss and possibly to
decide about the pollution and global warming that in those years was becoming increasingly apparent as a threat to human life on the planet.
The American President George Bush Senior declared that the American way of life was not negotiable, meaning that the US did not intend to
reduce carbon emissions, energy consumption and economic growth for the sake of the environmental future of the planet. Then, as on many
other occasions afterwards, the United States government refused to negotiate and to accept any global agreement on this subject. Today,
twenty years later, the
devastation of the environment, natural life and social life have reached a level that
seems to be irreversible. Irreversibility is a diffi cult concept to convey, being totally incompatible with
modern politics. When we use this word we are declaring ipso facto the death of politics itself. The
process of subjectivation develops within this framework, which reshapes the composition of
unconscious flows in the social culture. ‘Subjectivity is not a natural given any more than air or water.
How do we produce it, capture it, enrich it and permanently reinvent it in order to make it compatible
with universes of mutating values?’3 The problem is not to protect subjectivity. The problem is to create
and to spread flows of re-syntonization of subjectivity in a context of mutation. How can the subjectivity flows
that we produce be independent from the corrupting effects of the context, while still interacting with the context? How to create autonomous
subjectivity (autonomous from the surrounding corruption, violence, anxiety)? Is this at all possible in the age of the spasm? A
spasm is a
painful vibration which forces the organism to an extreme mobilization of nervous energies. This
acceleration and this painful vibration are the effects of the compulsive acceleration of the rhythm of
social interaction and of the exploitation of the social nervous energies. As the process of valorization of
semiocapital demands more and more nervous productivity, the nervous system of the organism is
subjected to increasing exploitation. Here comes the spasm: it is the effect of a violent penetration of the
capitalist exploitation into the fi eld of info-technologies, involving the sphere of cognition, of sensibility,
and the unconscious. Sensibility is invested by the info-acceleration, and the vibration induced by the
acceleration of nervous exploitation is the spasmic effect. What should we do when we are in a situation of spasm?
Guattari is not using the word ‘spasm’ in isolation. He says precisely: ‘chaosmic spasm’. If the spasm is the panic
response of the accelerated vibration of the organism, and the hyper-mobilization of desire submitted
to the force of the economy, chaosmosis is the creation of a new (more complex) order (syntony, and sympathy)
emerging from the present chaos. Chaosmosis is the osmotic passage from a state of chaos to a new order, where the word ‘order’
does not have a normative or ontological meaning. Order is to be intended as harmony between mind and the
semioenvironment, as the sharing of a sympathetic mindset. Sympathy, common perception. Chaos is
an excess of speed of the infosphere in relation to the ability of elaboration of the brain. In their last book,
What Is Philosophy?, which is about philosophy but also about growing old, Deleuze and Guattari speak of the relation between chaos and the
brain. ‘From Chaos to the Brain’ is the title of the last chapter of the book: We require just a little order to protect us from chaos. Nothing is
more distressing than a thought that escapes itself, than ideas that fl y off, that disappear hardly formed, already eroded by forgetfulness or
precipitated into others that we no longer master. These are infi nite variabilities the appearing and disappearing of which coincide. They
are infinite speeds that blend into the immobility of the colorless and silent nothingness they traverse,
without nature or thought. This is the instant of which we do not know whether it is too long or too
short for time. We receive sudden jolts that beat like arteries. We constantly lose our ideas.4 As
consciousness is too slow for processing the information that comes from the world in acceleration
(info-technology multiplied by semiocapitalist exploitation), we are unable to translate the world into a
cosmos, mental order, syntony and sympathy. A transformation is needed: a jump to a new refrain, to a new
rhythm; chaosmosis is the shift from a rhythm of conscious elaboration (refrain) to a new rhythm, which is
able to process what the previous rhythm could not process. A shift in the speed of consciousness, the creation of a different order of mental
processing: this is chaosmosis. In order to shift from a rhythm to a different rhythm, from a refrain to another refrain, Guattari says we
need
a ‘chaoide’, a living decoder of chaos. Chaoide, in Guattari’s parlance, is a sort of de- multiplier, an agent of re-
syntonization, a linguistic agent able to disengage from the spasmic refrain. The chaoide is full of chaos,
receives and decodes the bad vibrations of the planetary spasm, but does not absorb the negative
psychological effects of chaos, of the surrounding aggressiveness, of fear. The chaoide is an ironic elaborator of
chaos. ‘The ecosophical cartography’, writes Guattari, ‘will not have the finality of communicating, but of producing enunciation concatenations
able to capture the points of singularity of a situation’.5 Where are today’s concatenations that offer conscious organisms the possibility of
emerging from the present spasmogenic framework, the framework of financial capitalism? The rhythm that financial capitalism
is imposing on social life is a spasmogenic rhythm, a spasm that is not only exploiting the work of men
and women, not only subjugating cognitive labour to the abstract acceleration of the info-machine, but
is also destroying the singularity of language, preventing its creativity and sensibility. The financial dictatorship
is essentially the domination of abstraction on language, command of the mathematical ferocity on living and conscious organisms. This is
why we need to produce and to circulate chaoides, that is, tools for the conceptual elaboration both of
the surrounding and of the internalized chaos. A chaoide is a form of enunciation (artistic, poetic, political,
scientific) which is able to open the linguistic flows to different rhythms and to different frames of
interpretation. Chaosmosis means reactivation of the body of social solidarity, reactivation of
imagination, a new dimension for human evolution, beyond the limited horizon of economic growth.
The standardization and formatting of the cognitive body has made knowledge production obsolete –
our affirmation of affective and sensuous understandings of the body as a break from the
programming of sensibility is necessary to redevelop political autonomy.
Bifo 11 [Franco Berardi, aka “Bifo,” founder of the famous “Radio Alice” in Bologna and an important
figure of the Italian Autonomia Movement, is a writer, media theorist, and media activist. He currently
teaches Social History of the Media at the Accademia di Brera, Milan. “I Want to Think: POST-
U”//ASherm]
While the Japanese tragedy has exposed the poisonous effects of the subjugation of knowledge by an
obsession with capitalist accumulation, we should be able to consider what possibilities remain available
for creating an autonomy for knowledge from capitalism in the future. We should be able to imagine a pathway for
knowledge workers to self-organize, and we should be able to create the institutions, or models for future institutions, of knowledge
production and transmission. The complex mutation of knowledge production and transmission, and the related
transformation—or devastation—of modern institutions of education, has been a crucial outcome of
financial dictatorship in the sphere of semiocapital. Net Economy Let’s not forget that in the 1990s—when the
web prompted a new environment for cognitive activity, mutating the very methodology of producing
and distributing knowledge—many theorists, technologists, and economists spoke optimistically of a long, inexhaustible economic
boom, spreading the idea that collective intelligence and capitalism were finally allied. This was true in some sense, for the decade was
marked by the widespread proliferation of dot-com enterprises that acted as a space for empowering
cognitive labor, offering a degree of partial self-determination. Cognitive workers, engineers, artists, and scientists could create small,
dynamic structures for communication and common production. But this did not last. The 2000 downturn of the virtual
economy, the dot-com crash that followed, and the simultaneous change in cultural and political climate
triggered a reversal, and a process by which the subjectivity of the general intellect began to be
dismantle. The potency of mental activity came to be separated from the collective body, from the social circuitry of life. Enslavement In
this process of this dismantling, labor has been precarized, living time has been fractalized, and
collective intelligence has been subjugated. European governments’ attack on the educational system is the
final blow to the autonomy of knowledge. The subjectivity of the general intellect is dismantled as a
precondition to a much broader subjugation of the processes of knowledge, to the techno-linguistic
enslavement of cognitive behavior in the sphere of production and consumption. Sensibility The cognitive performance
of the precarious worker must become compatible, fractal, recombinable. Cognitive ability must be
detached from sensibility, from the ability to detect, interpret, and understand signs that cannot be translated into words. The
standardization of the cognitive process involves a digital formatting of the mind, disturbing the sphere
of sensibility, and finally destroying it. University In the transition from the bourgeois era of industrial
capitalism to the digital-financial era of semiocapital, mental energy (cognition) shifts to become the main
force of valorization. This process implies a special kind of incorporation (Marx uses the word “subsumption”) of mental energy. This
incorporation implies a standardization and formatting of the cognitive body, and bodily meaning and
meaningful bodies are erased as a result of this formatting. A decisive step in this subsumption process
comes in replacing the modern institution of the university with a recombinant system for exploiting
knowledge and canceling its autonomy. Since the 1999 Bologna Charter outlining the European educational system’s
transformation within a neoliberal framework, the autonomy of university and school has been under attack. Reason
The concept of autonomy has a crucial place in the definition of the modern university. It is not only a
political concept—referring to the interdependency of the academic institution—but also an
epistemological concept, referring to the inherent methodology of scientific knowledge and artistic
practice by which each field of knowledge establishes its laws, its conventions, aims, procedures, verification, and
change. During the bourgeois era, the university was based on two pillars: the relation between
intellectuals and the city, and the ethical and political role of reason. The second pillar marked the autonomy of
research and teaching, of the process of discovery, innovation, of the production and transmission of moral, scientific, and technical
acquisitions. As for the first, the bourgeoisie were strongly linked to the territory of their properties and concerned with their development, and
these owners and entrepreneurs understood the autonomy of knowledge to be necessary for achieving productive results. The
long
process of emancipation from theocratic dogma deeply influenced bourgeois culture and identity
throughout modern times. Biopolitics The post-bourgeois era came about through a financialization of the
economy and a de-localization of work and information. In The Birth of Biopolitics, Michel Foucault
foresees the process by which neoliberal transformation would later construct the homo economicus—
translating every idea and every act into economic terms and abolishing the autonomy of knowledge as
economy fully takes hold of social life. I do not believe that an economic science really exists. The neoliberal economy is a
technology that exploits the conceptual toolbox of economic study, transforming life into value and
crystallizing time as capital. This normative technology has progressively acquired a central position in
the system of knowledge and research, with every act of research, teaching, learning, and inventing subjected to economic
concerns: Can it be rented? Does it aid economic growth? Does it answer our corporate financiers’ demands? Reformation
The European educational system’s current process of so-called reform is marked by de-financing, cuts, job
losses, and also by a downsizing of non-rentable disciplinary fields—the so-called humanities—
accompanied by the increased support of capital-intensive fields of research. The leading principle of this reform is
the assertion of the epistemological primacy of the economic sphere. Margins Those who do not recognize the primacy of the
economic principle in the field of education—and who refuse to worship the central dogma of the neoliberal
church and its rules of competition, profitability, and compatibility—are labeled as skeptics, non-believers, atheists, and
subsequently marginalized and expelled. A new process is now emerging from the margins, from the spaces outside of the
jurisdiction of this new order. Self-organization While analyzing the decomposition of the educational system we
inherited, we should be able to detect and connect the points of cognitarian self-organization that rise
from our experiences of conflict, movement, and processes by which the social body is re-activated—
from our experiences of insurrections. Conflicts and movements have been storming the European university since October 2010,
and they will expand their influence in the coming years. The strategy is not to reinstate the previous public education
system, but rather to create institutions for the self-organization of the general intellect. Some post-
university projects have already been initiated (the international circuit of the Nomad University, for instance) and a wide
range of social groups are implementing processes of self-formation. We want to take part in this process by
building skeptic locales of re-imagination. Skepticism is the non-dogmatic stance that we adopt against economic dogmatism
and neoliberal arrogance. SCEPSI SCEPSI begins with the following premise: no matter what the European authorities do, Europe is over.
The evaporation of social energy, the falling expectations, and the final meltdown of finance are leading
the EU to a total collapse. What is our imagination of Europe in the very moment of its possible
dissolution? Poetry What is the place of art in this game of reinventing the institution once called a
university? Art is the decisive link between conscious mental activity and sensibility, and also between
sensibility and sensitivity. During the last decade, art has played a crucial role in modeling the perception of a
new form of alienation. If we think of experiences like Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s video works, or Jonathan Franzen’s Corrections, Gus Van Sant’s
Elephant, Miranda July’s No One Belongs Here More Than You and Me and You and Everyone We Know, and 3-Iron by Kim Ki-duk, to name just
a few, wecan consider the phenomenology of suffering in the age of the body and the soul’s
subjugation to the rhythm of semiocapital. Reactivating sensibility and sensitivity—the affective
and sensuous understanding of the other—becomes key to a self-organization of collective
intelligence. It is a therapeutic process of its own, a process that Félix Guattari would call simultaneously
chaosmotic and schizoanalytic. Poetry is the language of such a therapeutic project. The therapeutic and artistic act of poetry will open
a new space for epistemological autonomy.
 A2 BALLOT
Their arguments ignore the distinction between self-conscious and unconscious
autonomy
Opalsky 11 [Richard Gilman Opalsky “Beyond the Old Virtue of Struggle: Autonomy, Talent,
and Revolutionary Theory”//ASherm]
Nevertheless, as I have acknowledged, we do have some room for autonomous action in the here and now. So for
the last time, who should do what? As you may have guessed, no marching orders can be given. We must refuse to judge
the "credentials" of those who, in the manifold of human experience, do not throw themselves
into the same political activities that we might prefer, or even, that we might deem the most urgent. Any
program that seeks to iron out our real differentials of talent, or to minimize the fact that we have distinct and multifarious gifts, is a
program that must be abandoned. Guattari makes a highly resonant proposal along these lines: "New social practices of
liberation will not establish hierarchical relations between themselves; their development will
answer to a principle of transversality that will enable them to be established by 'traversing', as a
'rhizome', heterogeneous social groups and interests." [35] This means that a liberatory politics must allow for
the radical freedom of its participants, for autonomous action, but without devolving to atomistic individualism. Guattari's
rhizomatic approach provides one of the best ways to see the compatibility of autonomous and collective
action, to see collective action as autonomous. [63] The approach I have outlined is critical to the overarching goal.
For revolution to be worthy of our desire, we have to want to make it. This contention reflects the heart of
my general theory, but we must make no mistake about its relative openness. While the general
theory does not specify and recommend any certain course or chronology of action, it does
disqualify much of the radical milieu that has sought and continues to seek to provide concrete
revolutionary answers to social and political problems. [64] Moreover, while the argument functions first as a
general theory (as a perspective), it ultimately and ideally functions as an operational mode. And this operational mode
works against the operational modes of capital because the logos of autonomy is inassimilable to
the logos of capital—the latter of which depends on predictable patterns of consumption, labor, and recreation (autonomous
action can never guarantee, and inevitably destabilizes, such predictability). [65] Capital has not totally foreclosed
every space of autonomy, and it is in those spaces where we begin. We can only ever work against capitalism
from within it. We can only get to the outside from the inside. As McKenzie Wark has written: "Welcome to
gamespace... You are a gamer whether you like it or not, now that we all live in gamespace that is everywhere and nowhere. As
Microsoft says: Where do you want to go today? You can go anywhere you want in gamespace but you can never leave it." [36]
Autonomous action in existing capitalist societies still abides by certain game rules, none of which are
of our own making. And even
when we manage to create our own rules for our own games, we still play
them in the limited autonomous spaces of capital. [66] Wark's observation is important because it is indeed
possible that autonomous action in the here and now could become a trap. That is to say, because we have some room for autonomy
within the limits of capital, some level of relative gratification is achievable in the here and now. This, it seems to me, is part of the
reason why capitalism has not totally foreclosed on autonomy. As shared above, I am quite happy with my everyday life in the
capitalist present. But doesn't that daily disposition inadvertently vindicate the capitalist present? Even Marxists can be
happy in capitalist societies! If our talents can be explored, identified, and cultivated in the here and now, and if our
desires can be gratified, then there is little impetus to leave the present for some unknown future. [67] To avoid this trap, I
am not suggesting that we refuse all gratification and happiness, according to the old tune of the virtue of struggle.
Instead, autonomous action must become self-conscious. That is, actors must understand that
autonomy occurs in spite of or against the flows of capital that always aim to seize upon its open spaces. Self-
conscious autonomous action cannot function as an endorsement of the existing system. If autonomous action is not
self-conscious, then we may indeed become uncritically gratified with the precarious and ever-
tenuous autonomy that exists within the limits of capital. If such gratification as this occurs, autonomous action
loses its revolutionary character and doubles as an endorsement of capitalism instead. Hence, the revolutionary character
of autonomous action depends on the actor's awareness of capital's antagonistic regard for
autonomy; capital always subordinates freedom to accumulation. [68] When one experiences great joy in
the here and now, through love, or sexual pleasure, by epiphany or thrill, these experiences point to places where capitalism has not
totally colonized human life. Sure, you may try to buy the thrill by paying for it in a capitalist exchange,
but if you show up at the gates of an amusement park fully expecting to pay and are told that the
admission fee has been waived, the thrill is still there, but even better. Self-consciousness reveals
that the best things under capitalism are the least capitalist things. I am not going to credit the capitalist
system for all of the joyful play I share with my three-year-old son, play that occurs autonomously and beyond the interests of
capital. And, we must not lose sight of the fact that capitalism is never undermined for as long as
our autonomy remains an existential footnote to surviving. Vaneigem's distinction between surviving and
living is useful here: "Survival is life reduced to economic imperatives." [37] Whereas living is defined by spontaneity, desire, loving,
and pleasure, all of which are the first casualties of survival.

Why be active when you could be passive?

Bifo 11 [Franco Berardi aka “Bifo,” founder of the famous “Radio Alice” in Bologna and an
important figure of the Italian Autonomia Movement, is a writer, media theorist, and media
activist. He currently teaches Social History of the Media at the Accademia di Brera, Milan
“After The Future”//ASherm]
Nothing, not even the system, can avoid the symbolic obligation, and it is in this trap that the only
chance of a catastrophe for capital remains. The system turns on itself, as a scorpion does when encircled
by the challenge of death. For it is summoned to answer, if it is not to lose face, to what can only be
death. The system must itself commit suicide in response to the multiplied challenge of death and suicide. So hostages are taken.
On the symbolic or sacrificial plane, from which every moral consideration of the innocence of
the victims is ruled out the hostage is the substitute, the alter-ego of the terrorist, the hostage’s
death for the terrorist. Hostage and terrorist may thereafter become confused in the same
sacrificial act. (Baudrillard 1993a: 37) In these impressive pages Baudrillard outlines the end of the modern
dialectics of revolution against power, of the labor movement against capitalist domination, and
predicts the advent of a new form of action which will be marked by the sacrificial gift of death
(and self-annihilation). After the destruction of the World Trade Center in the most important terrorist act ever, Baudrillard wrote
a short text titled The Spirit of Terrorism where he goes back to his own predictions and recognizes the emergence of a catastrophic
age. When the code becomes the enemy the only strategy can be catastrophic: all the counterphobic
ravings about exorcizing evil: it is because it is there, everywhere, like an obscure object of desire. Without
this deep-seated
complicity, the event would not have had the resonance it has, and in their symbolic strategy the
terrorists doubtless know that they can count on this unavowable complicity. (Baudrillard 2003: 6)
This goes much further than hatred for the dominant global power by the disinherited and the exploited, those who fell on the wrong
side of global order. This malignant desire is in the very heart of those who share this order’s benefits.
An allergy to all definitive order, to all definitive power is happily universal, and the two towers
of the World Trade Center embodied perfectly, in their very double-ness (literally twin-ness), this
definitive order: 106 No need, then, for a death drive or a destructive instinct, or even for perverse, unintended effects.
Very logically – inexorably – the increase in the power heightens the will to destroy it. And it was
party to its own destruction. When the two towers collapsed, you had the impression that they were responding to the suicide of the
suicide-planes with their own suicides. It has been said that “Even God cannot declare war on Himself.” Well,
He can. The West, in position of God (divine omnipotence and absolute moral legitimacy), has become suicidal, and
declared war on itself. (Baudrillard 2003: 6-7) In Baudrillard’s catastrophic vision I see a new way of thinking subjectivity: a
reversal of the energetic subjectivation that animates the revolutionary theories of the 20th
century, and the opening of an implosive theory of subversion, based on depression and
exhaustion. In the activist view exhaustion is seen as the inability of the social body to escape the
vicious destiny that capitalism has prepared: deactivation of the social energies that once upon a
time animated democracy and political struggle. But exhaustion could also become the beginning of a slow
movement towards a “wu wei” civilization, based on the withdrawal, and frugal expectations of life and consumption.
Radicalism could abandon the mode of activism, and adopt the mode of passivity. A radical
passivity would definitely threaten the ethos of relentless productivity that neoliberal politics
has imposed. The mother of all the bubbles, the work bubble, would finally deflate. We have been
working too much during the last three or four centuries, and outrageously too much during the last thirty years. The current
depression could be the beginning of a massive abandonment of competition, consumerist drive,
and of dependence on work. Actually, if we think of the geopolitical struggle of the first decade – the struggle between
Western domination and jihadist Islam – we recognize that the most powerful weapon has been suicide. 9/11 is the most impressive
act of this suicidal war, but thousands of people have killed themselves in order to destroy American military hegemony. And
they won, forcing the western world into the bunker of paranoid security, and defeating the
hyper-technological armies of the West both in Iraq, and in Afghanistan
 A2 CAP GOOD
Their historical understanding of capitalism is hopelessly outdated, the exchange
of money has been completely separated from the real, creating the conditions for
massive violence
Bifo 11 [Franco Berardi aka “Bifo,” founder of the famous “Radio Alice” in Bologna and an
important figure of the Italian Autonomia Movement, is a writer, media theorist, and media
activist. He currently teaches Social History of the Media at the Accademia di Brera, Milan
“After The Future”//ASherm]
This sensibility permeated the surrealist and psychedelic imagination, and deeply penetrated Californian late modern culture,
helping in the creation of the hyper-visual Info-sphere which prevailed in the age of movies and TV. In the video-electronic
sphere images are no more pure representation of reality, they become simulation and psycho-
physical stimulation of the social brain, taking central place in the world of the commodity. Signs are not only
goods that can be produced and exchanged with money. They become the universal
merchandise, the general equivalent in economic perception. In a vertiginous turn, immaterial signs take the
place of physicals things, as the main object of capitalist valorization. And so, if the territorialized bourgeois economy
was based on the iconoclastic severity of iron and steel, postmodern deterritorialization is based
instead on the kaleidoscopic machine of semiotic production. This is why we can speak of semiocapitalism:
because the goods that are circulating in the economic world – information, finance, imaginary –
are signs, figures, images, projections, expectations. Language is no more a tool for representation of the
economic process, it becomes the main source of accumulation, constantly deterritorializing the field
of exchange. Speculation and spectacle intermingle, because of the intrinsic inflationary (metaphoric) nature of language. The
linguistic web of semio-production is a game of mirrors that inevitably leads to crises of
overproduction, bubbles and bursts. We need to see the social implications of the two different
streams of modernity: the relationship between the industrial bourgeoisie and the worker class
has been a relationship based on conflict but also on alliance and mutual cooperation. The dynamics
of progress and growth, stemming from the territorial physical space of the factory forced an agreement between the two
fundamental classes of industrial times, industrial workers and industrial bourgeoisie. This agreement was based on
collective negotiation and the creation of the Welfare State. The bourgeoisie and worker class
could not dissociate their destiny, despite the radical conflict opposing salary and profit, living
time and time of valorization. The ideology of dialectics, especially in the totalitarian vision of Leninist Communism
broke this alliance between bourgeoisie and worker, and turned the social history of the century into a radical split between capitalist
temporality and Soviet communist temporality. This dialectical polarization and stiffening of social conflict
into a form of identitarian, institutional and military antagonism provoked a catastrophic turn
in the history of social emancipation and in the perspective of social autonomy. The dialectical ideology did
not interpret workers’ interests, did not understand the complexity of the relationship between social struggle and
technological progress, and this forced social struggle into a conceptual trap that was broken in 1989, when the potency of social
autonomy all over the world was already exhausted and dissolving, under the effects of technological 77 restructuring. Since the
1970s the relation between capital and labor has been reframed, thanks to the new digital
technology and to the deregulation of the labor market. A huge effect of deterritorialization followed,
and the very foundation of the classical bourgeois conception was swept away, together with the
old workers’ class consciousness. The financialization of the global economy has eroded the
bourgeois identification of wealth with physical property and territorial labor. When labor loses its
mechanical form and becomes immaterial, linguistic, affective, the deterministic relation between time and
value is broken. The genesis of value enters in a phase of indetermination and uncertainty. The way is open to the arrival
of a Neo-Baroque vision of the world, and to the instauration of an aleatory logic in the heart of
economy: Deregulation. A new alliance became possible between labor and capital in the last decade of the 20th century.
The experience of dotcom enterprises was the expression of this alliance that made possible the
extraordinary technological progress of the digital sphere. But this alliance is broken when criminal behavior
fills the empty space of the aleatory. When language becomes the general field of production, when the
mathematical relation of labor-time and value is broken, when deregulation destroys all
liabilities, a criminal class takes the lead. This is what has happened since neoliberal politics has occupied the scene of the world.
The first principle of the neoliberal school, the deregulation that destroyed the political and legal
limits to capitalist expansion, cannot be understood as a purely political change. It has to be seen in the
context of the technological and cultural evolution which has displaced the process of valorization from the field of mechanical
industry to the field of semiotic production. The relation between labor time and valorization becomes
uncertain, undeterminable. Cognitive labor is hardly reducible to the measure of time. It’s
impossible to determine how much social time is necessary for the production of an idea. When
the relation between labor and value becomes indeterminable, what reigns in the global labor market is the pure
law of violence, of abuse. No more simple exploitation, but slavery, pure violence against the naked life of the workers of the
world.

Their investment in systems of economic rationality is precisely that which is

complicit in maintaining neoliberal modes of domination.
Berardi 11, |Franco, “After the Future”, P. 110-14|//MHELLIE
More than ever, economic rationality is at odds with social rationality. Economic science is not part
of the solution to the crisis: it is the source of the problem. On July 18th 2009 the headline of The
Economist read: “What went wrong with economics?” The text is an attempt to downplay the crisis of the
Economics profession, and of economic knowledge. For neoliberal economists the central dogma of growth, profit and competition
cannot be questioned, because it is identified with the perfect mathematical rationality of the
market. And belief in the intrinsic rationality of the market is crucial in the economic theology of
neoliberalism. But the reduction of social life to the rational exchange of economic values is an
obsession that has nothing to do with science. It’s a political strategy aimed to identify humans
as calculating machines, aimed to shape behavior and perception in such a way that money
becomes the only motivation of social action. But it is not accurate as a description of social dynamics, and
the conflicts, pathologies, and irrationality of human relationships. Rather, it is an attempt at creating the
anthropological brand of homo calculans that Foucault (2008) has described in his seminar of 1979/80, published
with the title The Birth of Biopolitics. This attempt to identify human beings with calculating devices has
produced cultural devastation, and has finally been showed to have been based upon flawed
assumptions. Human beings do calculate, but their calculation is not perfectly rational, because the value of goods is
not determined by objective reasons, and because decisions are influenced by what Keynes named animal spirits. “We
will never really understand important economic events unless we confront the fact that their
causes are largely mental in nature,” say Akerlof and Shiller (2009: 1) in their book Animal Spirits, echoing Keynes’s
assumption that the rationality of the market is not perfect in itself. Akerlof and Shiller are avowing the crisis of neoliberal thought,
but their critique is episteme. Animal Spirits is the title of an other book, by Matteo Pasquinelli (2008). Pasquinelli’s book deals with
bodies and digits, and parasites, and goes much deeper in its understanding of the roots of the crisis than its eponymous publication:
“Cognitive capitalism emerges in the form of a parasite: it subjects social knowledge and inhibits
its emancipatory potential” (Pasquinelli 2008: 93). “Beyond the computer screen, precarious workers and freelancers
experience how Free Labor and competition are increasingly devouring their everyday life” (Pasquinelli 2008: 15). Pasquinelli goes
to the core of the problem: the virtualization of social production has acted as the proliferation of a
parasite, destroying the prerequisites of living relationships, absorbing and neutralizing the
living energies of cognitive workers. The economic recession is not only the effect of financial craziness, but also the
effect of the de-vitalization of the social field. This is why the collapse of the economic system is also the collapse
of economic epistemology that has guided the direction of politics in the last two centuries.
Economics cannot understand the depth of the crisis, because below the crisis of financial
exchange there is the crisis of symbolic exchange. I mean the psychotic boom of panic,
depression, and suicide, the general decline of desire and social empathy. The question that rises from
the collapse is so radical that the answer cannot be found in the economic conceptual framework. Furthermore, one must ask if
economics really is a science? If the word “science” means the creation of concepts for the understanding
and description of an object, economics is not a science. Its object does not exist. The economic
object (scarcity, salaried labor, and profit) is not an object that exists before and outside the
performative action of the economic episteme. Production, consumption, and daily life become
part of the economic discourse when labor is detached and opposed to human activity, when it
falls under the domination of capitalist rule. The economic object does not pre-exist conceptual activity, and
economic description is in fact a normative action. In this sense Economics is a technique, a process of
semiotization of the world, and also a mythology, a narration. Economics is a suggestion and a categorical
imperative: Money makes things happen. It is the source of action in the world and perhaps the
only power we invest in. Life seems to depend on it. Everything within us would like to say that
it does not, that this cannot be. But the Almighty Dollar has taken command. The more it is
denied the more it shows itself as Almighty. Perhaps in every other respect, in every other value,
bankruptcy has been declared, giving money the power of some sacred deity, demanding to be recognized. Economics no longer
persuades money to 111 behave. Numbers cannot make the beast lie down and be quiet or sit up and do tricks. At best, economics is a
neurosis of money, a symptom contrived to hold the beast in abeyance…. Thus economics shares the language of psychopathology –
inflation, depression, lows and highs, slumps and peaks, investments and losses. (Sordello 1983) From the age of the enclosures in
England the economic process has been a process of production of scarcity (scarcification). The enclosures were intended to scarcify
the land, and the basic means of survival, so that people who so far had been able to cultivate food for their family were forced to
become proletarians, then salaried industrial workers. Capitalism is based on the artificial creation of need, and
economic science is essentially a technique of scarcification of time, life and food. Inside the
condition of scarcity human beings are subjected to exploitation and to the domain of profit-
oriented activity. After scarcifying the land (enclosures) capitalism has scarcified time itself, forcing people
who don’t have property other than their own life and body, to lend their life-time to capital. Now
the capitalist obsession for growth is making scarce both water and air. Economic science is not the science of
prediction: it is the technique of producing, implementing, and pushing scarcity and need. This is
why Marx did not speak of economy, but of political economy. The technique of economic scarcification is
based on a mythology, a narration that identifies richness as property and acquisition, and subjugates the possibility of living to the
lending of time and to the transformation of human activity into salaried work. In recent decades, technological change has slowly
eroded the very foundations of economic science. Shifting from the sphere of production of material objects to the semiocapitalist
production of immaterial goods, the Economic concepts are losing their foundation and legitimacy. The basic categories of
Economics are becoming totally artificial. The theoretical justification of private property, as you read in the writings of John Locke,
is based on the need of exclusive consumption. An apple must be privatized, if you want to avoid the danger that someone else eats
your apple. But what happens when goods are immaterial, infinitely replicable without cost? Thanks
to digitalization and immaterialization of the production process, the economic nomos of private
property loses its ground, its raison d’etre, and it can be imposed only by force. Furthermore, the very
foundation of salary, the relationship between time needed for production and value of the product, is vanishing. The
immaterialization and cognitivization of production makes it almost impossible to quantify the average time needed to produce
value. Time and value become incommensurable, and violence becomes the only law able to
determine price and salary. The neoliberal school, which has opened the way to the worldwide
deregulation of social production, has fostered the mythology of rational expectations in
economic exchange, and has touted the idea of a self-regulation of the market, first of all the
labor-market. But self-regulation is a lie. In order to increase exploitation, and to destroy social
welfare, global capitalism has used political institutions like the International Monetary Fund
(IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO), not to mention the military enforcement of the
political decisions of these institutions. Far from being self-regulated, the market is militarily regulated.
The mythology of free individuals loyally competing on the base of perfect knowledge of the market is a lie, too. Real human
beings are not perfect rational calculating machines. And the myth of rational expectations has finally crashed
after the explosion of the real estate mortgage bubble. The theory of rational expectation is crucial in neoliberal thought: the
economic agents are supposed to be free to choose in a perfectly rational way the best deal in selling and buying. The fraud
perpetrated by the investment agencies has destroyed the lives of millions of Americans, and has exposed the theoretical swindle.
Economic exchange cannot be described as a rational game, because irrational factors play a
crucial role in social life in general. Trickery, misleading information, and psychic manipulation
are not exceptions, but the professional tools of advertisers, financial agents, and economic
consultants. The idea that social relationships can be described in mathematical terms has the force of myth, but it is not
science, and it has nothing to do with natural law. Notwithstanding the failure of the theory, neoliberal politics are still in
control of the global machine, because the criminal class that has seized power has no intention
of stepping down, and because the social brain is unable to recompose and find the way of self-
organization. I read in the New York Times on September 6th 2009: After the mortgage business imploded last year, Wall
Street investment banks began searching for another big idea to make money. They think they may have found one. The bankers
plan to buy “life settlements,” life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash, depending on the life expectancy of the
insured person. Then they plan to “securitize” these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds of thousands together
into bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors, like big pension funds, who will receive the payouts when people with the
insurance die. The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return, though if people live longer than expected investors could get
poor returns or even lose money. Imagine that I buy an insurance policy on my life (something I would absolutely not do). My
insurer of course will wish me a long life, so I’ll pay the fee for a long time, while he should pay lots of money to my family if I 113 die.
But some enlightened finance guru has the brilliant idea of insuring the insurer. He buys the risk, and he invests on the hope that I
die soon. You don’t need the imagination of Philip K. Dick to guess the follow up of the story: financial agents will be motivated to
kill me overnight. The talk of recovery is based on necronomy, the economy of death. It’s not new, as
capitalism has always profited from wars, slaughters and genocides. But now the equation
becomes unequivocal. Death is the promise, death is the investment and the hope. Death is the
best future that capitalism may secure. The logic of speculation is different from the logic of spectacle that was
dominant in late-modern times. Spectacle is the mirrorization of life, the transfer of life in the mirror of spectacular accumulation.
Speculation is the subjugation of the future to its financial mirror, the substitution of present life with future money that will never
come, because death will come before. The lesson that we must learn from the first year of the global
recession is sad: neoliberal folly is not going away, the financial plungers will not stop their
speculation, and corporations will not stop their exploitation, and the political class, largely
controlled by the corporate lobbies, is unwilling or unable to protect society from the final
assault. In 1996 J. G. Ballard (1996: 188) wrote: “the most perfect crime of all – when the victims
are either willing, or aren’t aware that they are victims”. Democracy seems unable to stop the
criminal class that has seized control of the economy, because the decisions are no longer made in the sphere of political opinion, but
in the inaccessible sphere of economic automatism. The economy has been declared the basic standard of
decision, and the economists have systematically identified Economy with the capitalist
obsession of growth. No room for political choice has been left, as the corporate principles have
been embedded in the technical fabric of language and imagination.
 A2 EGYPT
Resistance in Egypt was based upon form and not content
Opalsky 11 [Richard Gilman Opalsky “Beyond the Old Virtue of Struggle: Autonomy, Talent,
and Revolutionary Theory”//ASherm]
In 1968, Fredy Perlman summarized the pacifying mythology of capitalism. We are made to believe, he wrote, that
"people do not have such power in this society, and this society is the only form of society; therefore it's impossible for
people to have such power." Yet, Perlman rejects this, insisting that "The question of what is possible cannot be
answered in terms of what is." [38] Autonomous action in the here and now reveals the power of
everyday people that is often buried and hidden in everyday life. Recently, there could be no better example
than the rebellion in Egypt in January and February of 2011. It took the world's most powerful military
several years to implement the very beginnings of "regime change" in Iraq, whereas the
unarmed and precarious people of Egypt only needed 18 days. While the Egyptian uprising was too
heterogeneous to articulate any ideal end-state, the resounding content of the message coming from the streets of Cairo was that the
existing state of affairs must end, igniting the world's sense of the possible versus the actual. And it must be stressed that the
overwhelming tone of the 18 days of protest precipitating Hosni Mubarak's ouster was ebullient
and joyful, full of desire and feeling, and was itself quite a departure from the "struggle" of
everyday life up to that point. [70] It is also critical to emphasize that the "results" of the popular
insurrection in Egypt have been overemphasized by too many observers around the world. Critics of the
uprising continually ask what's next, worrying about the Muslim Brotherhood and Sharia law. Supporters, on the other hand, point
to Mubarak's ouster as evidence of the rebellion's virtue, or, in an effort to qualify their own optimism, remind us that the military's
management of the government must prove temporary and transitional, and must give way to something better before any final
verdict can be given. In contrast to all of these discourses, I propose that there are some things we already know
with certainty—that the rebellion was a rejection of the old lie that the existing society was the
only form the Egyptians could possibly know, that it was a realization of the power of everyday people. Indeed,
for all of its internal heterogeneity, the uprising declared unequivocally that the question of what
is possible cannot be answered in terms of what is—and it did so in the form of joyful collective
action. In this way, we already have a verdict. We should not look forward to the ends of insurrection, but rather, to its
multiplication and continuation, to insurrection everywhere. [71] What are the unknown hereafters we should
hope to get to from the here and now? I will not guess or predict, but I suspect that the kingdom of
heaven will be no kingdom at all. I am reassured by the fact that Hobbes's Sovereign, much like
Hosni Mubarak, was never enthusiastic about the autonomy of his subjects, although both knew that the
autonomous action of everyday people was always a possibility to be guarded against. [39] Realizations of that
possibility—autonomous action in the here and now—exacerbate the contradictions of capital
and power. And the pleasure of autonomous acts of revolt invites us to think of revolution beyond
its historic fixation on struggle. With such an invitation as this, revolution may finally become desirable.
AT: FRAMEWORK
 A2 EDUCATION
Your attempts at economic education are bad
Bifo 11 [Franco Berardi aka “Bifo,” founder of the famous “Radio Alice” in Bologna and an
important figure of the Italian Autonomia Movement, is a writer, media theorist, and media
activist. He currently teaches Social History of the Media at the Accademia di Brera, Milan
“After The Future”//ASherm]
More than ever, economic rationality is at odds with social rationality. Economic science is not part of the
solution to the crisis: it is the source of the problem. On July 18th 2009 the headline of The Economist read: “What went wrong with
economics?” The text is an attempt to downplay the crisis of the Economics profession, and of economic knowledge. For
neoliberal economists the central dogma of growth, profit and competition cannot be
questioned, because it is identified with the perfect mathematical rationality of the market. And
belief in the intrinsic rationality of the market is crucial in the economic theology of neoliberalism. But the reduction of
social life to the rational exchange of economic values is an obsession that has nothing to do
with science. It’s a political strategy aimed to identify humans as calculating machines, aimed to shape behavior and perception
in such a way that money becomes the only motivation of social action. But it is not accurate as a description of social dynamics, and
the conflicts, pathologies, and irrationality of human relationships. Rather, it is an attempt at creating the anthropological brand of
homo calculans that Foucault (2008) has described in his seminar of 1979/80, published with the title The Birth of Biopolitics.
This attempt to identify human beings with calculating devices has produced cultural
devastation, and has finally been showed to have been based upon flawed assumptions. Human
beings do calculate, but their calculation is not perfectly rational, because the value of goods is not determined by objective reasons,
and because decisions are influenced by what Keynes named animal spirits. “We will never really understand important economic
events unless we confront the fact that their causes are largely mental in nature,” say Akerlof and Shiller (2009: 1) in their book
Animal Spirits, echoing Keynes’s assumption that the rationality of the market is not perfect in itself. Akerlof and Shiller are avowing
the crisis of neoliberal thought, but their critique is 110 not radical enough, and does not touch the legitimacy of the economic
episteme. Animal Spirits is the title of an other book, by Matteo Pasquinelli (2008). Pasquinelli’s book deals with bodies and digits,
and parasites, and goes much deeper in its understanding of the roots of the crisis than its eponymous publication: “Cognitive
capitalism emerges in the form of a parasite: it subjects social knowledge and inhibits its
emancipatory potential” (Pasquinelli 2008: 93). “Beyond the computer screen, precarious workers and
freelancers experience how Free Labor and competition are increasingly devouring their
everyday life” (Pasquinelli 2008: 15). Pasquinelli goes to the core of the problem: the virtualization of social production has
acted as the proliferation of a parasite, destroying the prerequisites of living relationships, absorbing and neutralizing the living
energies of cognitive workers. The economic recession is not only the effect of financial craziness, but
also the effect of the de-vitalization of the social field. This is why the collapse of the economic system is also the
collapse of economic epistemology that has guided the direction of politics in the last two centuries. Economics cannot
understand the depth of the crisis, because below the crisis of financial exchange there is the
crisis of symbolic exchange. I mean the psychotic boom of panic, depression, and suicide, the
general decline of desire and social empathy. The question that rises from the collapse is so
radical that the answer cannot be found in the economic conceptual framework. Furthermore, one
must ask if economics really is a science? If the word “science” means the creation of concepts for the understanding and description
of an object, economics is not a science. Its object does not exist. The economic object (scarcity, salaried labor, and profit) is
not an object that exists before and outside the performative action of the economic episteme.
Production, consumption, and daily life become part of the economic discourse when labor is detached and opposed to human
activity, when it falls under the domination of capitalist rule. The economic object does not pre-exist conceptual
activity, and economic description is in fact a normative action. In this sense Economics is a
technique, a process of semiotization of the world, and also a mythology, a narration. Economics is a
suggestion and a categorical imperative: Money makes things happen. It is the source of action in the world and perhaps the only
power we invest in. Life seems to depend on it. Everything within us would like to say that it does not, that this cannot be. But the
Almighty Dollar has taken command. The more it is denied the more it shows itself as Almighty.
Perhaps in every other respect, in every other value, bankruptcy has been declared, giving
money the power of some sacred deity, demanding to be recognized. Economics no longer persuades
money to 111 behave. Numbers cannot make the beast lie down and be quiet or sit up and do tricks. At best, economics is a neurosis
of money, a symptom contrived to hold the beast in abeyance…. Thus economics shares the language of psychopathology – inflation,
depression, lows and highs, slumps and peaks, investments and losses. (Sordello 1983) From the age of the enclosures in England
the economic process has been a process of production of scarcity (scarcification). The enclosures were intended to
scarcify the land, and the basic means of survival, so that people who so far had been able to
cultivate food for their family were forced to become proletarians, then salaried industrial
workers. Capitalism is based on the artificial creation of need, and economic science is essentially a technique
of scarcification of time, life and food. Inside the condition of scarcity human beings are subjected to exploitation and to the domain
of profit-oriented activity. After scarcifying the land (enclosures) capitalism has scarcified time itself, forcing people who don’t have
property other than their own life and body, to lend their life-time to capital. Now the capitalist obsession for growth is
making scarce both water and air. Economic science is not the science of prediction: it is the technique of producing,
implementing, and pushing scarcity and need. This is why Marx did not speak of economy, but of political economy. The
technique of economic scarcification is based on a mythology, a narration that identifies
richness as property and acquisition, and subjugates the possibility of living to the lending of
time and to the transformation of human activity into salaried work. In recent decades, technological
change has slowly eroded the very foundations of economic science. Shifting from the sphere of production of material objects to the
semiocapitalist production of immaterial goods, the Economic concepts are losing their foundation and legitimacy. The basic
categories of Economics are becoming totally artificial. The theoretical justification of private property, as you read in the writings of
John Locke, is based on the need of exclusive consumption. An apple must be privatized, if you want to avoid the danger that
someone else eats your apple. But what happens when goods are immaterial, infinitely replicable
without cost? Thanks to digitalization and immaterialization of the production process, the economic nomos of private property
loses its ground, its raison d’etre, and it can be imposed only by force. Furthermore, the very foundation of salary, the relationship
between time needed for production and value of the product, is vanishing. The immaterialization and cognitivization of production
makes it almost impossible to quantify the average time needed to produce value. Time and value become incommensurable, and
violence becomes the only law able to determine price and salary. The neoliberal school, which has opened the way to the worldwide
112 deregulation of social production, has fostered the mythology of rational expectations in economic exchange, and has touted the
idea of a selfregulation of the market, first of all the labor-market. But self-regulation is a lie. In order to increase exploitation, and to
destroy social welfare, global capitalism has used political institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade
Organization, not to mention the military enforcement of the political decisions of these institutions. Far from being self-
regulated, the market is militarily regulated. The mythology of free individuals loyally competing
on the base of perfect knowledge of the market is a lie, too. Real human beings are not perfect rational
calculating machines. And the myth of rational expectations has finally crashed after the explosion of the real estate mortgage
bubble. The theory of rational expectation is crucial in neoliberal thought: the economic agents are supposed to be free to choose in a
perfectly rational way the best deal in selling and buying. The fraud perpetrated by the investment agencies has
destroyed the lives of millions of Americans, and has exposed the theoretical swindle. Economic
exchange cannot be described as a rational game, because irrational factors play a crucial role in
social life in general. Trickery, misleading information, and psychic manipulation are not exceptions, but the professional tools of
advertisers, financial agents, and economic consultants. The idea that social relationships can be described in mathematical terms
has the force of myth, but it is not science, and it has nothing to do with natural law. Notwithstanding the failure of the
theory, neoliberal politics are still in control of the global machine, because the criminal class
that has seized power has no intention of stepping down, and because the social brain is unable to recompose
and find the way of self-organization. I read in the New York Times on September 6th 2009: After the mortgage business imploded
last year, Wall Street investment banks began searching for another big idea to make money. They think they may have found one.
The bankers plan to buy “life settlements,” life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash, depending on the life
expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to “securitize” these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds of
thousands together into bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors, like big pension funds, who will receive the payouts
when people with the insurance die. The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return, though if people live longer than
expected investors could get poor returns or even lose money. Imagine that I buy an insurance policy on my life (something I would
absolutely not do). My insurer of course will wish me a long life, so I’ll pay the fee for a long time, while he should pay lots of money
to my family if I 113 die. But some enlightened finance guru has the brilliant idea of insuring the insurer. He buys the risk, and he
invests on the hope that I die soon. You don’t need the imagination of Philip K. Dick to guess the follow up of the story: financial
agents will be motivated to kill me overnight. The talk of recovery is based on necronomy, the economy of
death. It’s not new, as capitalism has always profited from wars, slaughters and genocides. But
now the equation becomes unequivocal. Death is the promise, death is the investment and the
hope. Death is the best future that capitalism may secure. The logic of speculation is different from the logic of
spectacle that was dominant in late-modern times. Spectacle is the mirrorization of life, the transfer of life in the mirror of
spectacular accumulation. Speculation is the subjugation of the future to its financial mirror, the substitution of present life with
future money that will never come, because death will come before. The lesson that we must learn from the first year of the global
recession is sad: neoliberal folly is not going away, the financial plungers will not stop their speculation, and corporations will not
stop their exploitation, and the political class, largely controlled by the corporate lobbies, is unwilling or unable to protect society
from the final assault. In 1996 J. G. Ballard (1996: 188) wrote: “the most perfect crime of all – when the victims
are either willing, or aren’t aware that they are victims”. Democracy seems unable to stop the criminal class that
has seized control of the economy, because the decisions are no longer made in the sphere of political opinion, but in the inaccessible
sphere of economic automatism. The economy has been declared the basic standard of decision, and the
economists have systematically identified Economy with the capitalist obsession of growth. No
room for political choice has been left, as the corporate principles have been embedded in the technical fabric of
language and imagination.

Give us the ballot for having been such good life coaches if you don’t pay us,
semiocapitalism will consume you
Engman 15 [Summer, “Why I happily pay my life coach the big bucks”//ASherm]
What I know now is that the price tag is actually one of the main reasons I got all that I got out of that
experience. The price seemed out of my range and that was a good thing because it was the first
step in starting a new life where everything I did required me to expand my range. That’s what they mean when
they say the magic happens outside of our comfort zone. I actually transformed every aspect of my
life in those ten months and set out on a path that would bring me much abundance, joy, and
fulfillment, and I believe I was able to finally make all those changes primarily because of the size of the financial investment I
made. That investment set the tone for how much time and energy I invested in the journey. It
seemed to demand my utter devotion to the process. I often wonder, had I not made a significant financial
investment, if maybe I’d have just let myself off the hook when things got difficult in my personal
growth journey. I think the answer is probably yes. I consider myself lucky that I was crazy
enough that first time to throw down the cash before I knew if working with coaches would even
get me anywhere. And I’m especially lucky that my coach today never lets me use the fact that I pay
him a lot of money as an excuse to rely on him to solve my life for me.
 A2 SKILLS
Your skills aren’t a direct result of reading a plan
Speaks 6 [Jeff Speaks Professor of Philosophy University of Notre Dame “Hume and the
classical problem of induction”//ASherm]
The problem of induction is the problem of explaining the rationality of believing the conclusions of arguments like the above on the
basis of belief in their premises. Put another way: supposing that we had good reason for believing that the premises in the above
arguments are true, why would this (at least sometimes) provide us with good reason for also believing the conclusions? Hume sets
up the problem like this: “All reasonings concerning matter of fact seem to be founded on the relation
of cause and effect. By means of that relation alone can we go beyond the evidence of our
memory and senses. If you were to ask a man, why (Tt)he(y) believes any matter of fact, which is absent;
for instance that his friend is in the country . . . (t)he(y) would give you a reason; and this reason would be
some other fact; as a letter received from him, or the knowledge of his former resolutions and promises. . . . All our
reasonings concerning fact are of the same nature. And here it is constantly supposed that there is a
connection between the present fact and that which is inferred from it. . . . If we would satisfy ourselves,
therefore, concerning the nature of that evidence, which assures us of matters of fact, we must inquire how we arrive at the
knowledge of cause and effect.” Though he begins just by talking about cause and effect, it is clear that he
is concerned with the general question of how observation of one state of affairs (such as the receiving
of a letter from a friend, saying that the friend is in the country) could provide evidence for belief in another state of affairs (such as
that the friend is in the country). Hume is asking how knowledge of this sort could be possible. In answering
this question, he brings to bear a distinction between what he takes to be the only two legitimate sources of knowledge: “All the
objects of human reason or inquiry may naturally be divided into two kinds, to wit, relations of
ideas, and matters of fact. Of the first kind are the sciences of geometry, algebra, and arithmetic; and in short, every
affirmation which is either intuitively or demonstratively certain. . . . Propositions of this kind are discoverable by
the mere operation of thought, without dependence on what is anywhere existent in the
universe. . . . Matters of fact, which are the second objects of human reason, are not ascertained in
the same manner; . . . The contrary of every matter of fact is still possible; because it can never imply a
contradiction, and is conceived by the mind with the same facility and distinctness, as if ever so conformable to reality. That the
sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more
contradiction than the affirmation, that it will rise. . . . It may, therefore, be a subject worthy of curiosity, to
inquire what is the nature of that evidence which assures us of any real existence and matter of fact, beyond the present testimony of
our senses, or the records of our memory.” The nature of this distinction; the senses as one route to knowledge of matters of facts;
the remaining question of how we come to know about matters of fact which we do not directly observe. Two possibilities: (i)
we know by reason alone of some (presumably causal) connection between the distinct states of
affairs, and (ii) we know of such a connection by experience. Hume argues that neither (i) or (ii) can
give an adequate explanation of how we are justified in this sort of knowledge. First, he argues that we
do not know of the connections between distinct matters of fact by reason alone: “I shall venture to
affirm, as a general proposition, which admits of no exception, that the knowledge of this relation is not, in any
instance, attained by reasonings a priori; but arises entirely from experience, when we find that
any particular objects are constantly conjoined with each other. Let an object be presented to a man of ever
so strong natural reason and abilities; if that object be entirely new to him, he will not be able, by the most accurate examination of
its sensible qualities, to discover any of its causes or effects.” He gives a second, related argument using a principle about ‘distinct
existences’. The idea is that, given that there are no necessary connections between fully distinct
objects (events, states of affairs), there is no way for reason alone to discern any connection between
them. This is why, in the passage you read, Hume argues “In a word, then, every effect is a distinct event from its cause. It could
not, therefore, be discovered in the cause . . . ” At the end of ‘Part I’, Hume takes himself to have established that we can not
know of the causal connections between distinct states of affairs by reasoning alone. So option (i)
above for justifying our beliefs about matters of fact not directly observed has been closed off. In Part II, he begins the investigation
of the prospects of option (ii): that these beliefs are justified by experience. He suggests, however, that there is a problem
with this sort of justification as well: “As to past experience, it can be allowed to give direct and
certain information of those precise objects only, and that precise period of time, which fell
under its cognizance: but why this experience should be extended to future times, and to other
objects . . . this is the main question on which I would insist. The bread, which I formerly eat, nourished me;
that is, a body of such sensible qualities was, at that time, endued with such secret powers: but
does it follow, that other bread must also nourish me at another time, and that like sensible
qualities must always be attended with like secret powers? The consequence seems no wise necessary. At least,
it must be acknowledged that there is here a consequence drawn by the mind . . . which wants to be explained. These two
propositions are far from being the same, I have found that such an object has always been attended with such an effect, and I
foresee, that other objects, which are, in appearance, similar, will be attended with similar effects. . . . if you insist that the
inference is made by a chain of reasoning, I desire you to produce that reasoning.” Inductive
reasoning cannot be justified directly by experience, since experience only directly gives us
knowledge of sensed states of affairs, and inductive reasoning takes us beyond sensed to un-
sensed states of affairs. So maybe the connection between the two relevant classes of states of affairs is known by experience
to obtain. But this thought falls prey to the objection in the text: all experience gives us knowledge of is the past conjunction of two
kinds of states of affairs (e.g., its being morning and the sun’s coming up). But the proposition that in the past,
morning has always been accompanied by the sun coming up is different from the proposition
that, in the future, morning will be accompanied by the sun coming up. Even if experience gives
us knowledge of the former proposition, it does not give us knowledge of the latter . So Hume’s
challenge remains unanswered. It is natural to try to respond to this challenge by citing the uniformity of
nature: we are justified in moving from propositions about past correlations to propositions
about future correlations by our knowledge that nature is, in general uniform: the past is, in relevant
respects, like the future. This could fill the gap in the above inductive arguments; adding this principle of the uniformity of nature in
as a second premise, we get something like the following: 1. Every day in the past, the sun has risen. 2. Nature is uniform. (The
future will be like the past.) C. Tomorrow, the sun will rise. Details aside, this looks like a deductively valid argument (unlike our
original inductive arguments). So maybe this is an answer to Hume’s problem: we are justified in making inductive inferences
because we are justified in believing in the uniformity of nature. Though this sounds plausible and promising, it
runs into an immediate problem: how is our belief in the uniformity of nature justified? How, that
is, do we know that the future will be like the past? Here it seems that we fact the same choices as above: either we
know it by reason, or we know it by experience. It seems that we cannot know it by reason alone,
since there is nothing contradictory in the supposition that the future will not be like the past.
We cannot know it directly by experience, since we cannot observe the future. A natural thought is that
we can know of the uniformity of nature by experience, but without observing the future, by observing that, in the past, nature has
always been uniform. This is true, but no help in our predicament. Hume puts the point like this: “We have said
that all arguments concerning existence are founded on the relation of cause and effect; that our
knowledge of that relation is derived entirely from experience; and that all our experimental
conclusions proceed upon the supposition that the future will be conformable to the past . To
endeavor, therefore, the proof of this last supposition by probably arguments, or arguments regarding
existence, must be evidently going in a circle, and taking that for granted, which is the very point
in question.” Hume’s idea here is this. We want to justify our belief that the future will be like the past
in terms of our experience that (as we might put it) in the past, the future has always been like
the past. But this is just another case in which we are trying to explain knowledge of some
correlation’s now holding in terms of knowledge of that correlation’s holding in the past. But how
do we move from the latter bit of knowledge to the former? How, that is, do we know that if in the past it has
always been true that the future was like the past, then now it is true that the future will be like
the past? Presumably, by our knowledge of the uniformity of nature. But that was the very bit of alleged
knowledge that we were trying to justify. Moral of the story: we would be justified in our inductive
inferences if we were justified in believing in the uniformity of nature; but we cannot be justified
in the latter, since the uniformity of nature is knowable neither by reason nor by experience.
AT: KRITIKS
 GENERIC
The 1ac stripped the emperor, but forgot to laugh at the emperors new clothes
Fernando 10 [Jeremy, The Suicide Bomber and Her Gift Of Death//ASherm]
In the same way, the King's power lies in his scepter and crown; power lies not in the person, but in the sign(s)
displayed. Since traditionally no one could look a King in the face - those that could were but few - no one really knew what the
King looked like. In effect, the person that held the scepter and wore the crown on his head was the
King. Hence, it is not the person who is King, but the person that displays the correct sign(s)
that is King: the ' kingliness' of the person resides not in him but in the sign(s): the person no longer matters; he might as well
be dead. In fact, it is probably better that he is dead : no one would bow before another person; but a scepter,
that is another matter completely. It is for this reason that the ghost in Handel has no name - this ensures that he is the
eternal source of power. The scepter of the king continues to haunt the kingdom; it is still his kingdom even and perhaps especially
because he is dead. This is also why Hamlet's response to the ghost's cry to ." re-member me" is perfect: by writing him dawn,
Hamlet ensures' that the scepter enters the real m of re-presentation; is forever i'e-producible, endlessly re-producible, and hence,
eternal. The answer to the question, ' What makes a king, King?' is 'you' . But not in the
acknowledgment of the superiority of the person . for if that were so, all jokes about the British royal family would
be impossible - but rather in the acknowledgment of the crown - literally the object on the head – itself. Once
again we turn to the emperor's New Clothes for a lesson: it is not that the Emperor had so much power that the
people did not dare to point out that he wasn't wearing any clothes (and that it took an 'innocent' child to
point out the truth), but rather that his power was in the fact that everyone agreed on the fact that he
was wearing his ' new clothes' . It is the child·. that reveals the perverse core of the King's power: it is completely .external
to the person of the King (or even the sign systems in the form of the crown); power rests in the subjects themselves.
This is the paradox of power: subjects must first conceive of themselves as subjects, in order to
be .' subjected. However the point of transgression is not a resistance of· this subjectification - that
would only result in the crushing of resistor via the network (the other subjects who remain as barring the unique situation of a
critical mass. But even with critical mass, the outcome is usually merely the replacement of power with
another which is exactly the same: this is what revolutions are about; moving about and around
in circles. This why one king (or leader, or even political party) can often replaced by another without any problem; oftentimes
life goes as usual the very next day after a ' major' revolution. As long as signs displayed are the same, it makes
absolutely no difference who is ' wearing' the ·signs. This was why Mikhail Gorbachev provided
such a shock to the system: the person remained the same, but the signs were changed from the
Secretary-General as the Absolute Head, to a Secretary-General who was open and receptive to
external influences. And it is this changing of the sign system which the system cannot handle
 NEOLIB
Structures of capital are only able to sustain themselves through the organization
of cognitive energy for the purpose of activism
Bifo 11 [Franco Berardi aka “Bifo,” founder of the famous “Radio Alice” in Bologna and an
important figure of the Italian Autonomia Movement, is a writer, media theorist, and media
activist. He currently teaches Social History of the Media at the Accademia di Brera, Milan
“After The Future”//ASherm]
Futurism and the avant-garde set themselves the task of violating rules. Deregulation was the legacy
left by Rimbaud to the experimentation of the 1900s. Deregulation was also the rallying cry of the hyper-
capitalism of late modernity, paving the way for the development of semiocapital. In the totalitarian
period of the external machine and mechanical speed, having previously used the state form to impose its rule on society, capitalism
decided to do without state mediation as the techniques of recombination and the absolute speed of electronics made it possible for
control to be interiorised. In the classical form of manufacturing capitalism, price, wages and profit
fluctuations were based on the relationship between necessary labor time and the determination
of value. Following the introduction of microelectronic technologies and the resulting
intellectualisation of productive labor, the relationship between different magnitudes and
different productive forces 25 entered a period of indeterminacy. Deregulation, as launched by Margaret
Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, marked the end of the law of value and turned its demise into a political economy. In his main work,
Symbolic Exchange and Death, Jean Baudrillard (1993a: 2) intuitively infers the overall direction of the development of the end of
the millennium: “The reality principle corresponded to a certain stage of the law of value. Today, the
whole system is swamped by indeterminacy, and every reality is absorbed by the hyperreality of
the code and simulation.” The whole system precipitates into indeterminacy as all correspondences between symbol and
referent, simulation and event, value and labor time no longer hold. But isn’t this also what the avant-garde aspired
to? Doesn’t experimental art wish to sever the link between symbol and referent? In saying this, I am
not accusing the avant-garde of being the cause of neoliberalist economic deregulation. Rather, I
am suggesting that the anarchic utopia of the avant-garde was actualized and turned into its
opposite the moment society internalised rules and capital was able to abdicate both juridical
law and political rationality to abandon itself to the seeming anarchy of internalised
automatisms, which is actually the most rigid form of totalitarianism. As industrial discipline dwindled,
individuals found themselves in a state of ostensible freedom. No law forced them to put up with duties and dependence.
Obligations became internalised and social control was exercised through a voluntary albeit
inevitable subjugation to chains of automatisms. In a regime of aleatory and fluctuating values, precariousness
became the generalised form of social relations, which deeply affected the social composition and the psychic, relational and
linguistic characters of a new generation as it entered the labor market. Rather than a particular form of productive
relations, precariousness is the dark soul of the productive process. An uninterrupted flow of
fractal and recombining info-labor that circulates in the global web as the agent of universal
valorisation, yet its value is indeterminable. Connectivity and precariousness are two sides of the same coin: the flow
of semiocapitalist production captures and connects cellularized fragments of de-personalised time; capital purchases fractals of
human time and recombines them in the web. From the standpoint of capitalist valorisation, this flow is
uninterrupted and finds its unity in the object produced; however, from the standpoint of
cognitive workers the supply of labor is fragmented: fractals of time and pulsating cells of labor
are switched on and off in the large control room of global production. Therefore the supply of
labor time can be disconnected from the physical and juridical person of the worker. Social labor
time becomes an ocean of valorising cells that can be summoned and recombined in accordance with the needs of capital. Let us
return to the Futurist Manifesto: war and the contempt for women are the essential features of mobilization, which traverses the
whole parable of historical vanguards. The Futurist ambition really consisted in mobilising 26 social
energies towards the acceleration of the productivity of the social machine. Art aided the discourse of
advertising as the latter fed into mobilisation. When industrial capitalism transposed into the new form of semiocapitalism, it first
and foremost mobilised the psychic energy of society to bend it to the drive of competition and cognitive productivity. The new
economy of the 1990s was essentially a prozac-economy, both neuromobilization and
compulsory creativity. Paul Virilio has shown the connection between war and speed: in the modern forms of domination,
the imposition of war onto the whole of social life is an implicit one precisely because economic competitiveness is war, and war and
the economy share common grounds in speed. As Walter Benjamin writes: “all efforts to render politics aesthetic
culminate in one thing: war.” The becoming aesthetic of life is one aspect of this mobilisation of
social energies. The aestheticization of war is functional to the subjugation of everyday life to the
rule of history. War forces the global masses to partake in the process of selfrealisation of the Hegelian Spirit, or, perhaps more
realistically, to become part of capitalist global accumulation. Captured in the dynamics of war, everyday life is
ready to be subjected to the unlimited rule of the commodity. From this standpoint, there is no
difference between fascism, communism and democracy: art functions as the element of
aestheticization and mobilisation of everyday life. Total mobilization is terror, and terror is the
ideal condition for a full realisation of the capitalist plan to mobilise psychic energy. The close
relation between Futurism and advertising is an integral part of this process. In Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the
Long Twentieth Century, Gerald Raunig (2007) writes on the relationship between the artistic avantgarde and
activism. His work provides a useful phenomenological account of the relation between art and
political mobilisation in the 20th century, but it fails to grasp the absolute specificity of the
current situation, that is, the crisis and exhaustion of all activism. The term “activism” became largely
influential as a result of the antiglobalisation movement, which used it to describe its political communication and the connection
between art and communicative action. However, this definition is a mark of its attachment to the past and its inability to free itself
from the conceptual frame of reference it inherited from the 20th century. Should we not free ourselves from the
thirst for activism that fed the 20th century to the point of catastrophe and war? Shouldn’t we set
ourselves free from the repeated and failed attempt to act for the liberation of human energies from the rule of capital? Isn’t the
path towards the autonomy of the social from economic and military mobilisation only possible
through a withdrawal into inactivity, silence, and passive sabotage? I believe that there is a profound
relationship between the drive to activism and the male depression of late modernity, which is most
evident in the voluntaristic and subjectivist organisation of Leninism. Both from the 27 standpoint of the
history of the workers’ movement in the 1900s and from that of the strategic autonomy of society from capital, I am convinced
that the 20th century would have been a better century had Lenin not existed. Lenin’s vision interprets
a deep trend in the configuration of the psyche of modern masculinity. Male narcissism was confronted with the
infinite power of capital and emerged from it frustrated, humiliated, and depressed. It seems to me
that Lenin’s depression is a crucial element for understanding the role his thought played in the
development of the politics of late modernity.

The days of protest are over, the social fabric which sustained ethical engagement
during the 2oth century have been destroyed by the fractalization of labor
Bifo 11 [Franco Berardi aka “Bifo,” founder of the famous “Radio Alice” in Bologna and an
important figure of the Italian Autonomia Movement, is a writer, media theorist, and media
activist. He currently teaches Social History of the Media at the Accademia di Brera, Milan
“After The Future”//ASherm]
From Seattle 1999 to Genoa 2001 a movement tried to stop the capitalist devastation of the very
conditions of civilized life. These were the stakes, no more, no less. The counter-globalization global people had a simple
message: if we do not stop the machine of exploitation, debt, and compulsory consumption,
human cohabitation on the planet will become dark, or impossible. Well, ten years after Seattle, in
the wake of the 2009 Copenhagen summit failure, we can state that those people were speaking
the truth. The global movement against capitalist globalization reached an impressive coverage and
pervasiveness, but it was never able to change the daily life of society. It stayed an ethical movement, not a social
transformer. It could not create a process of social recomposition, it could not produce an effect of
social subjectivation. Those people were silenced by President Bush, after the huge demonstrations of February 15th 2003
when many millions of people worldwide gathered in the streets against the war in Iraq. The absence of movement is
visible today, at the end of the zero zero decade: absence of an active culture, lack of a public sphere, void of collective
imagination, palsy of the process of subjectivation. The way to build a conscious collective subject seems
obstructed. What now? Now a conscious collective change seems impossible at the level of daily life.
Yes, I know, change is happening everyday, at a pace that we have never experienced before. What is the election of a
black President at the head of the United States if not change? But change is not happening in the sphere of social
consciousness. Change happens in the spectacular sphere of politics, not in daily life, and the
relationship between politics and daily life has become so tenuous, so weak that sometimes I would say that
whatever happens in politics, life will not change. The
fantastic collapse of the economy is certainly going to
change things in daily life, you can bet on it. But is this change consciously elaborated? Is this connected with some
conscious collective action? It is not. This is why neoliberal fanaticism, notwithstanding its failure, is
surviving and driving the agenda of the powers of the world. The so-called counter-globalization
movement, that was born in the days of Seattle, on the eve of the end of the century, has been a collective conscious
actor, a movement of unprecedented strength and extent. But it has changed nothing in the daily life of the
masses, it has not changed the relationship between salaried labor and capitalist enterprise, it has not changed the daily relationship
between precarious workers, it has not changed the condition of life of migrants. It has not created solidarity between people in the
factories, in 9 the schools, in the cities. So, neoliberal politics failed, but social autonomy could not emerge. The ethical
consciousness of the insanity of neoliberal politics spread everywhere but it did not shape the
affective and social relations between people. The movement has stayed an expression of ethical protest; it has,
nonetheless, produced effects. The neoliberal ideology that was before accepted as the word of God, as a natural
and undisputable truth, started to be questioned in the days following the Seattle riots, and was widely
denounced. But the ethical demonstrations did not change the reality of social domination. The
global corporations did not slow the exploitation of labor and the massive destruction of the planet’s environment. The warmongers
did not stop organizing and launching deadly attacks against civil populations in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Palestine, and in many
other places of the world. Why so? Why is it that the largest demonstration in human history, the antiwar
Global Action that the movement launched on February 15th 2003 did not succeed in stopping
the bombing of Baghdad? Why was conscious collective action, although massive, and worldwide, unable to change things?
This is the question I have been trying to answer during the last ten years, this is the question that I have been trying to answer in
this book. I’ll say here, in short, that the answer is not to be found in the political strategy of the fight, but
in the structural weakness of the social fabric. During the 20th century, social struggle could
change things in a collective and conscious way because the industrial workers were able to
create solidarity and unity in daily life, and so could fight and win. Autonomy was the condition of
victory, because autonomy means the ability to create social solidarity in daily life, and means the
ability to self-organize outside the rules of labor and exploitation. Autonomous community was the condition of political strength.
When social recomposition is possible, collective conscious change is possible. In social history
we can speak of recomposition when the forces of labor can create common cultural flows and a
common ground of sensibility, so that they become a collective actor, sharing the same questions and sometimes also the same
answers. In conditions of social recomposition social autonomy from capital becomes possible.
Autonomy is the possibility of counterbalancing the power of capital, counterpower in daily life, in the
factories, neighborhoods, houses, in the affective relationships between people. That seems to be over. The
organization of labor has been fragmented by the new technology, and workers’ solidarity has
been broken at its roots. The labor market has been globalized, but the political organization of
the workers has 10 not. The info-sphere has dramatically changed and accelerated, and this is jeopardizing
the very possibility of communication, empathy and solidarity. In the new conditions of labor and
communication lies our present inability to create a common ground of understanding and a
common action. The movement that spread in the first years of the decade has been able to
denounce the effects of capitalist globalization, but it has not been able to find the new path of
social organization, and of autonomy from capitalist exploitation

The workers of the world no longer have a direct means of production to seize,
their movement terminally fails
Bifo 11 [Franco Berardi aka “Bifo,” founder of the famous “Radio Alice” in Bologna and an
important figure of the Italian Autonomia Movement, is a writer, media theorist, and media
activist. He currently teaches Social History of the Media at the Accademia di Brera, Milan
“After The Future”//ASherm]
Let’s consider the political side of the same problem: once upon a time when society was suffering the blows of
recession, workers reacted with strikes, struggle and political organization, and forced state intervention
in order to increase demand. Industrial growth needed mass consumption and social stability.
What is impressive in the ongoing crisis, on the contrary, is the widespread passivity of the workers, their
inability to unionize. The political trend in Europe is the meltdown of leftist parties and the labor movement. In the US,
Obama is daily attacked by racist and populist mobs, but no progressive social movement is
emerging. 1.2 million people have had their mortgages foreclosed upon and lost their houses following the sub-prime swindle,
but no organized reaction has surfaced. People suffer and cry alone. In the old time of industrial capitalism,
the working class could fight against a target that was precisely identified: the boss, the entrepreneur
who was the owner of material things like the factory, and of the product of his laborers. Nowadays the boss has vanished. He
is fragmented into billions of financial segments, and disseminated into millions of financial
agents scattered all around the world. The workers themselves are part of recombinant financial
capital. They are expecting future revenues from their pension fund investments. They own stock options in the enterprise
exploiting their labor. They are hooked up, like a fly in a spider web, and if they move, they get
strangled, but if they don’t move, the spider will suck their life from them. Society may rot, fall
apart, agonize. It is not going to affect the political and economic stability of capitalism. What is
called economic recovery is a new round of social devastation. So the recession is over, capitalism is
recovering. Nonetheless, unemployment is rising and misery is spreading. This means that financial
capitalism is autonomous from society. Capitalism doesn’t need workers: it just needs cellular
fractals of labor, underpaid, precarious, de-personalised. Fragments of impersonal nervous energy,
recombined by the network. The crisis is going to push forward technological change, and the
substitution of human labor with machines. The employment rate is not going to rise in the
future, and productivity will increase. A shrinking number of workers will be forced to produce more and more, and to
work overtime

Marx’s idea of class struggle results in the re-creation of capitalism

Opalsky 11 [Richard Gilman Opalsky “Beyond the Old Virtue of Struggle: Autonomy, Talent,
and Revolutionary Theory”//ASherm]
In Paris in May-June 1968, and in Italy in the decade from roughly 1968 to 1978, capital could not keep desire in
abeyance. While Vaneigem and Guattari have much in common, I find Guattari's analysis particularly useful here, because his
consideration of the place of desire is more complex and more explicitly political. Micropolitics
is playful in a dangerous way but it is not a simple expression of desire. The micro-revolution of
Guattari's "becoming-woman," to take one example, is not teleologiccal for any one desired end
of identity. Becoming destabilizes what is, and on a macropolitical scale such destabilization is
revolutionary. Guattari's psychoanalytic understanding of human desire makes a critical
intervention in various forms of Marxism, and particularly autonomist Marxism: Desire can be disfigured in various
ways, it can be repressed or buried in everyday life, but desire and its disfigurations can nevertheless be
understood. Psychoanalysis can help with this understanding. Desire is never completely
disintegrated, and can be let loose in micro-revolutionary political moments. As such, desire
decenters struggle. [40] But struggle has long been considered a virtue. Beyond Marx's centralization of
class struggle, Frederick Douglass famously said, "If there is no struggle there is no progress." [25] Douglass's observation of the
facts of the world, a fundamental fact of human history from Marx's perspective, has contributed to the fetishization of
struggle (as has much of revolutionary theory). But who wants to struggle? Should anyone want to struggle, even if at
times they must? Doesn't struggle already define much of the everyday life of the precarious class,
and isn't struggle precisely what makes it so painful? Does it make any sense psychologically to make struggle the
centerpiece of a revolutionary project? If ever one can find some way forward without struggle, won't that
path always offer a special and sensible temptation? It is time for revolutionary theory to stop glorifying struggle.
[41] However, struggle is sometimes the cry, or the scream, of the oppressed and exploited, of those
who must fight for self-determination. As Holloway says, opposition to capitalism starts with "a scream
of sadness, a scream of horror, above all a scream of anger, of refusal: NO." [26] How long can we sustain such a
scream of sadness, horror, and anger, and how long should we wish to? All living persons seek relief from
sadness, horror, and anger, and they seize upon such relief at the first opportunities. And capitalism provides enough
opportunities for a temporary respite from the miseries of everyday life to squelch the scream
before it turns revolutionary. So, can revolutionary aspirations find some other impetus than the scream of struggle to
supplement and sustain revolutionary praxis? [42] Autonomous action within the limits of capital—self-
directed, micropolitical, and joyful—is the scream's complement. We cannot simply choose between the
screams of struggle, on the one hand, and pleasure, on the other, nor should we assert a hard separation between the two. The
majority of the world's people, living on the losing end of capital, are stuck with struggle as a
kind of modus operandi. But for an ongoing contestation of capitalism and its culture, without the negation of desires and
talents, struggle is never enough. As long as the fight for a better future places our desires and talents in
abeyance, the fight will cede too quickly, and power has the patience to wait it out. Some of the most
inspiring saturnalias of revolutionary upheaval begin and end over the course of a long weekend. Struggle must be
decentered. If struggle is the only modality of revolution, then only the most selfless among us
will assist the inevitable struggles (and one wonders about the psychic health of such individuals).
 PSYCHOANALYSIS
Desire is no longer structured by an ontological lack, but by the pervasiveness of
capitalism
Bifo 9 [Franco Berardi aka “Bifo,” founder of the famous “Radio Alice” in Bologna and an
important figure of the Italian Autonomia Movement, is a writer, media theorist, and media
activist. He currently teaches Social History of the Media at the Accademia di Brera, Milan
“Precarious Rhapsody”//ASherm]
The anti-authoritarianism of the 1970s operated within a Freudian conceptual framework, though expanding and subverting its
historical outlook. In Eros and Civilization Herbert Marcuse proclaims the actuality of the liberation of collective eros.
Repression constricts the potential of technology and knowledge and prevents their full
development; yet critical subjectivity actually unfolds by enabling the full expression of the
libidinal and productive potential of society, and creating the conditions for a full realization of
the pleasure principle. The analysis of modern society intersects the description of the mechanisms of discipline that
repressively shape social institutions and public discourse. The recent publication of Michel Foucault’s 1979 lectures (2008) compels
us to shift the barycenter of Foucault’s thought away from repressive discipline and towards the creation of dispositifs of biopolitical
control. However, Foucault still operates in his own way within the ‘repressive’ paradigm throughout
his work on the genealogy of modernity (in particular, in History of Madness, The Birth of the Clinic, and Discipline
and Punish). Even Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, despite the openly declared abandonment of the
Freudian framework in Anti-Oedipus, operate within the field of problematization outlined by
Freud in 1929: desire is the motor of the movement that traverses both society and the path of
Precarious Rhapsody / 106 singularity, whilst desiring creativity has to constantly come to terms with
the repressive war machines wedged by capitalism into every fold of existence and imagination.
The concept of desire cannot be flattened out by a reading of it in terms of ‘repression.’ In Anti-Oedipus
desire is opposed to lack. The philosophy of dialectics flourished and the politics of the twentieth
century built its (mis)fortunes on the notion of lack: a notion of dependency rather than
autonomy. Lack is a product, determined by the regime of economics, religion and psychiatric domination. Rather than
lack, it is desire as creation that gives ground to processes of erotic and political subjectivation. In
this respect, Deleuze and Guattari help our understanding of repression as nothing but a projection
of desire: rather than the manifestation of a structure, desire is the possibility of creating
thousands of structures. Desire can crystallize structures and turn them into obsessive refrains. Desire constructs traps to
entrap desire. Yet the analytical dispositif forged by Foucault’s genealogy and Deleuze and Guattari’s creationism predominantly
views subjectivity as being capable of causing the desire that was removed to re-emerge in the face of repressive social sublimation;
this is an anti-repressive, or, rather, expressive view. The relationship between structure and desire is the key
to the move of Guattari’s schizoanalysis outside the orbit of Lacanian Freudianism. For Guattari,
desire can be understood neither from the standpoint of structure, nor as a possible variant that
depends on the invariance of the mathème; creative desire produces infinite structures, amongst which are also
those functioning as dispositifs of repression. The domain of semio-capital If we want to leave the Freudian
framework behind, we have to approach the position of Jean Baudrillard, whose contribution
initially looked like a form of dissuasive thinking. Baudrillard draws a different scenario: in the early 1970s (in The
System of Objects, The Consumer Society, and Forget Foucault), he claims that the motor of capitalist development is
desire, and the ideology of liberation corresponds to the full domination of the commodity:
rather than repression, simulation and the proliferation of simulacra and seduction are the new
framework of the imaginary. Baudrillard sees an excess of expressivity as the essential core of this overdose of reality.
The real grows like a desert. Illusions, dreams, passions, madness, drugs, but also the artifice
and the simulacrum, all used to be natural predators of reality. But they’ve all lost their energy, as if hit by an
incurable and insidious disease (2006: 21). Baudrillard foresaw a tendency that would become predominant in the following
decades. His analysis shows how simulation transforms the subject-object relation forcing the subject
into the subaltern position of someone who succumbs to seduction. Rather than the subject, the
object is the agent and the whole question of alienation, repression and the uneasiness they
produce thus fades away. In the much cited ‘Postscript on control societies,’ which he wrote during the last years of his life,
Deleuze appears to put under question the architecture deriving from Foucault’s notion of discipline and to move in the direction of
the Baudrillard of the early 1970s. Here, I am not interested in a comparison between a theory of simulacra and a theory of desire –
which sooner or later deserves to be carried out – but in the scenario of psychopathologies that emerges as
industrial society nears its end giving way to semiocapitalism, namely, a capitalism founded on
immaterial labor and the explosion of the info-sphere. Overproduction is an inherent feature of
capitalism because, rather than to the logic of the concrete needs of human beings, commodity
production responds to the abstract logic of value production. However, the kind of overproduction
manifest in semiocapitalism is specifically semiotic; an infinite excess of signs circulates in the
info-sphere and saturates individual and collective attention. Baudrillard’s intuition proved to be crucial in
the long run. The prevailing pathology of times to come is a product of the generalized compulsion to expression, rather than
repression. The first video-electronic generation shows signs of the effects of pathologies of hyper-
expression, not of repression. When dealing with the suffering of our times and the discomfort of the first connective
generation, we are no longer in the conceptual framework of Freud’s Civilization and its
Discontents. In Freudianism, at the basis of pathology lies concealment: something is hidden from us,
removed, and then disappears; we are prevented from something. Evidently, the basis of pathology today is no longer
concealment but hypervision, an excess of visibility, the explosion of the info-sphere and an
overload of info-neural stimuli. Not repression, but hyper-expressivity is the technological and
Precarious Rhapsody / 108 anthropological domain of our understanding of the genesis of contemporary
psychopathologies such as AHDD, dyslexia, and panic. These indicate a different way of processing informational input,
whilst manifesting themselves as suffering, uneasiness and marginalization. Though it might not be necessary, it is worth pointing
out that my approach has nothing to do with reactionary and bigot preaching on the evils caused by so-called permissiveness or how
good the repression of yesteryear was for our minds and customs. In their introduction to a book on contemporary forms of
psychopathology, the editors of Civiltà e Disagio [Civilization and discomfort] state: Our purpose in this book is to rethink the
binomial relationship between civilization and discomfort in the light of the deep social transformations our lives have undergone.
One of the most significant of these is a change of sign in the imperative of the social Super-Ego
of our times. Whilst the Freudian imperative required a renunciation of instincts, the new social
imperative thrusts us towards enjoyment. In fact, the symptoms of discomfort of contemporary
civilization are closely related to enjoyment; they are either real practices of it (drug related perversions, bulimia,
obesity, and alcoholism), or manifestations of a narcissistic closure that produces stagnations of enjoyment in the body (anorexia,
depression, and panic) (Cosenza, Recalcati, Villa: 2006). Freud identified the dominant social psychopathology
with neurosis, which he believed to be the effect of a process of removal; today this is psychosis,
which is increasingly associated with the domain of excesses of energy and information, rather than
with removal. In his schizoanalytical works, Guattari concentrated on the possibility of reworking the whole
field of psychoanalysis starting from a redefinition of the relationship between neurosis and
psychosis, and from the central methodological and cognitive role of schizophrenia. The political effects of his
redefinition were very powerful and coincided with the explosion of the neurotic limits imposed
on expression by capitalism through the restriction of agency to the repressive boundaries of
labor and the subjection of desire to a disciplinary removal; but the very schizomorphous pressure
of movements and the eruption of expression in the social lead to a metamorphosis (or a schizo-
metamorphosis) of languages, forms of production and, lastly, capitalist exploitation. The
psychopathologies spreading to the everyday lives of the first generations of the age of connection cannot be comprehended within
the repressive and disciplinary framework. Rather than pathologies of removal, they are pathologies of the
‘Just do it’: hence, the centrality of psychosis. Unlike clinical neurosis, which is symbolic because operative
within the linguistic and rhetorical domain of removal and the normative foundations of Oedipus, psychosis is always a
clinic of the real, not governed by symbolic castration, and thus closer to the truth of structure (it
is structurally impossible to symbolize the real of enjoyment as a whole) (Cosenza, Recalcati, Villa, 2006: 4). The dispersal of
identity points to the absence of a center for the identification that occurs in neurosis, which
would enable the subject to structure a strong Ego within certain boundaries and become
integrated in primary relations with objects and their identification (Cosenza, Recalcati, Villa, 2006: 22).
From the standpoint of semio-pathology, schizophrenia could be seen as an excess of semiotic
flows with respect to the power of interpretation. As the universe starts moving too fast and too many signs are
calling for our interpretation, the mind is no longer able to distinguish the lines and points that shape things. So we try to grasp
meaning through a process of over-inclusion and an extension of the boundaries of signification.
In the conclusion to their last joint work, Deleuze and Guattari write: We require just a little order to protect us
from chaos. Nothing is more distressing than a thought that escapes itself, than ideas that fly off,
that disappear hardly formed, already eroded by forgetfulness or precipitated into others that we
no longer master. These are infinite variabilities, the appearing and disappearing of which coincide. They are infinite speeds
that blend into the immobility of the colorless and silent nothingness they traverse, without nature or thought (1994: 201)

Language no longer functions as the formation of subjectivity through the mother-

child relationship, but through the machine-child relationship
Bifo 11 [Franco Berardi aka “Bifo,” founder of the famous “Radio Alice” in Bologna and an
important figure of the Italian Autonomia Movement, is a writer, media theorist, and media
activist. He currently teaches Social History of the Media at the Accademia di Brera, Milan
“After The Future”//ASherm]
Language undergoes a mutation, which is a technological mutation but also a psychic one. In the human psyche,
as Freud says, the access to language has much to do with affection and primarily with the body
of the mother. What about the linguistic relationship between the mother and child, when the Infosphere
is saturated with info-stimuli, and the presence of the mother becomes so scarce? In Show and Tell
Machine, published in 1977, the American anthropologist Rose Goldsen argued that we are giving birth to human
beings that will learn more words from machines than from mothers. In the first decade of the new century
this generation has occupied the stage of social activity, and is ready to become compatible with
the digital flow. 101 For the new generation access to language has more and more to do with inorganic
connection, and less and less to do with the body of the mother. In her book L’ordine simbolico della madre
[The Symbolic Order of the Mother], Luisa Muraro (1991) discovers the intimate relationship between signifier and signified,
between sign and meaning, between word and affection. I believe in the meaning of the word “water” and I
acknowledge the relationship between the signifier “water” and the liquid meaning because I
trust in my mother. She has certified the relation between signifier and signified. What happens when the
relation is broken, when the access to language is separated from the body and from affection,
reduced to mere inter-operability between mechanic segments of an-emotional exchange? I say
that language is in this way made precarious, frail, unable to grasp the emotional meaning of words. Actually
the generation that is now entering the social sphere seems psychologically frail and scarcely fit
to link emotion and verbal exchange. The huge multiplication of tools for communication, the digital saturation of the
info-sphere, has dramatically reduced the spaces and the times of bodily interaction between persons. Let us think of the
crowd of people sitting in the subway every morning. They are precarious workers moving
towards the industrial and financial districts of the city, towards the places where they are working in
precarious conditions. Everyone wears headphones, everybody looks at their cellular device,
everybody sits alone and silent, never looking at the people who sit close, never speaking or
smiling or exchanging any kind of signal. They are traveling alone in their lonely relationship with the universal
electronic flow. Their cognitive and affective formation has made of them the perfect object of a
process of de-singularization. They have been pre-emptied and transformed into carriers of abstract fractal ability to
connect, devoid of sensitive empathy so to become smooth, compatible parts of a system of interoperability. Although they
suffer from nervous aggression, and from the exploitation that semiocapitalism is imposing on
them, although they suffer from the separation between functional being and sensible body and
mind, they seem incapable of human communication and solidarity; in short, they seem unable
to start any process of conscious collective subjectivation.

Our radical passivity is good

Zizek 8 [Slavoj, “Violence”//ASherm]
While the parallel holds. the concluding characterisation seems to fall short: the unsettling message of
See- ing is not so much the indissolubility of both people and government as the compulsive
nature of democratic rituals of freedorn. What happens is that by abstaining from voting. people
eEeetively dissolve the moment-not only in the limited sense of overthrowing the existing
government. but more radically. Why is the government thrown into such a panic by the voters’ abstention? It is
compelled to confront the fact that it exists, that it ex- erts power. only insofar as it is accepted as such by its
subjects-accepted even in the mode of rejection. The voters’ abstention goes further than the intra-
political negation. the vote of no confidence: it rejects the very frame of decision.in psychoanalytic terms, the
voters’ abstention is something like the psychotic Verwerfung (foreclosure. rejection/repudiation), which is
a more radical move than repression (Verdrdngung). According to Freud. the repressed is intellectually
accepted by the subject. since it is named. and at the same time is negated because the subject
refuses to recognise it. refuses to recognise him or herself in it. In contrast to this. foreclosure rejects the term from the
symbolic tout court. To circumscribe the contours of this radical rejection. one is tempted to evoke Badiou’s
provocative thesis: ‘It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways
of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent."6 Better to do nothing than
to engage in localised acts the ultimate function of which is to make the system run more
smoothly (acts such as providing space for the multitude of new subjectivities). The threat today is not passivity.
but pseudo- activity. the urge to “be active.’ to “participate.” to mask the nothingness of what
goes on. People intervene all the time, 'do something“; academics participate in meaningless
debates. and so on. ‘The truly diflicult thing is to step back. to withdraw. Those in power often
prefer even a "critical" participation. a dialogue. to silence- just to engage us in “dialogue.” to
make sure our ominous passivity is broken. The voters” abstention is thus a true political act: it
forcefully confronts us with the vacuity of today‘s democracies. If one means by violence a radical upheaval of
the basic social relations. then. crazy and tasteless as it may sound. the problem with historical monsters who slaughtered millions
was that they were not violent enough. Sometimes doing nothing is the most violent thing to do.
AT: BIFO (NEG)
 CAP LINK
Bifo’s apolitical understanding of communism ensures the continued existence of
capitalism
Lear 12 [Ben Lear is an underemployed researcher living in Manchester, UK. He recently co-
authored an article in Occupy Everything! Reflections on Why it's Kicking off Everywhere, and is
a member of Plan C. “Lifeboat Communism – A Review of Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s After the
Future”//ASherm]
What does the end of the future mean for radical politics? It is at this point that Bifo’s argument becomes problematic.
In an argument that intersects with groups such as Tiqqun, Bifo argues that we must see “Communism as a
necessity in the collapse of capital.” Distant from the voluntarism of previous forms of
Communist politics, this “post-growth Communism” will be best understood as a necessary
response to capital’s refusal of labour. Cut adrift from the “opportunity” to work, with welfare systems dismantled, Bifo
argues that we will witness the proliferation of zones of autonomy responding to the needs of an increasingly precarious and
superfluous social body. Communist politics will emerge from an exodus, both voluntary and compulsory, from a stagnating and
increasingly predatory state-capital nexus. This exodus is both social, in the development of an alternative infrastructure, and
personal, in the withdrawal from the hyper-stimulation of the semiotic economy. Bifo abandons hope in collective
contestation at the level of the political. Bifo’s politics could be described as a kind of “lifeboat
communism.” As the crisis ripples, mutates, and deepens, Bifo sees the role of communism as
the creation of spaces of solidarity to blunt the worst effects of the crisis of social reproduction.
Gone is the demand for a better world for all, the liberation of our collective social wealth, or the unlocking of the social potentials of
technology. Rather, Bifo’s politics are based around insulating a necessarily small portion of society
from the dictates of capital. By withdrawing from the political sphere, we accept the likelihood of losing
the final scraps of the welfare state and concede the terrain of the political to zombie politics and predatory
capital. Rather than seeking new forms of organization to re-enter the political stage, Bifo seems to suggest that
we seek shelter beneath it as best we can. This shying away from the political stage is the weakness at the heart of the book.
Recent eruptions of political struggle have captured the collectiveimagination because they
demonstrate that political contestation is still possible today, in spite of the obstacles Bifo has
described. The Occupy movement and the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa have
resonated with all those who still have hope in collective struggle. Although these movements
have encountered varying problems, to which we must develop solutions, they dispel the idea of
an unchangeable present. The current blockages to successful organising have been shown to be strategic and tactical, not
terminal. Misdiagnosing the current inertia of post-political public life as a terminal condition
leads the left towards an evacuation of the political, while we should instead reassert its primacy.
If we abandon any hope of fighting in, against, and beyond the existing architecture of the state and capital, and
instead seek refuge in small communes, and go-slow practices, we abandon all real hope of a generalized, or
generalizable, emancipatory politics. Although Bifo’s analysis of the difficulties of collective action resonates with all of
us who have attempted to organize struggles in the past few decades, the proposal for a simple withdrawal from capitalism is a bleak
politics indeed – which, at its most optimistic, calls for an orderly default by portions of the proletariat. The horizons of
communist politics appear much narrower when capitalism is no longer seen as the repository
of a vast store of social wealth awaiting collective redistribution, but rather redefined as an
unassailable site of universal and permanent austerity combined with widening social
redundancy. It is hard to imagine a network of self-organized projects and systems supporting the majority of the population in
the context of an increasingly predatory capitalism. Emerging from the and isolated leftist scenes, this lifeboat communism will by
its very nature have a limited carrying capacity, as the anarchist experience in post-Katrina New Orleans attests. The lifeboats
that Bifo calls for will undoubtedly be too small and makeshift to harbor us all. The crisis is twofold. It
is a crisis of capitalist profitability, and of an increasingly precarious and surplus global proletariat whose reproduction (as both
labour and body) is under threat. It is unlikely that the proliferation of communes, squats, food co-ops,
file sharers, urban gardeners, and voluntary health services will bring forth a new, better world .
But while the current seemingly post-political situation throws up massive obstacles to organizing, there is still a potential for
collective contestation. The capitalist state, racked by its own legitimacy crisis and weekly political
scandals, is more vulnerable than it appears. We need only recall the period of unexpected hope built by students in
Britain, occupiers in Oakland, and vast swathes of North Africa and the Middle East during the past two years. These movements
were mobilised through the betrayal of a vision of the future – but alongside their rage, they put forth a hope which can guide our
politics. The task at hand is to unlearn old behaviour and to forge new tactical and organisational weapons for struggle. Bifo’s
contribution is a timely and challenging one, but it ultimately leads us back towards a DIY culture and “outreach” politics. As our
movements come to terms with these limits, we must also hold onto the belief that luxury for all is possible. The social potential of
unfilled blocks of flats, emerging technologies like 3D-printing, and the desires of the millions of underemployed, should remind us
of this. This will not be possible without a collective struggle against the state and the demands of capital, one which simultaneously
defends what we have and attempts to move beyond it. A retreat to lifeboat politics is both premature and a self-fulfilling prophecy.
While Bifo correctly analyses the current conjuncture – clearly identifying the post-political state, the weakness
of the Left, the crisis of profitability and new forms of labour, and their impact on the subject – his
political prescriptions
lead us in the wrong direction. Just as Bifo does, we place the struggle against work at the
center; but we can also seek to liberate social wealth, rather than insulate a lucky few from the ravages of capital.
Rather than “No Future,” we must raise a different banner: “The future’s here, it just needs
reorganizing.”

Bifo’s theory justifies the massive violence done by contemporary capitalism

Keefer 11 [Lucas Keefer is currently a graduate student studying philosophy and psychology at
Georgia State University. “Review - The Soul at Work” //ASherm]
Of course, some Marxist theorists have already been aware of this need for a critique of contemporary consciousness and have
suggested important alternatives. Berardi follows Deleuze and Guattari in adopting a therapeutic approach, though we might also
follow Lefebvre (1943/2009) and suggest that a critique of semiocapitalism might also depend on returning
to an analysis of the reality of alienation in the everyday lives of those oppressed. If the “soul”
oppresses itself under semiocapitalism, it does so only by investing all meaning in the symbolic reality of simulations. Marxist-
scientific critique remains, therefore, one way of returning this oppressed symbolic
consciousness to the reality of its oppression (see also e.g. Martín-Baró, 1994). Berardi also notes the ways in which
semiocapitalism pathologizes (and medicates) reactions against alienation (207). The increased rates of depression and availability
of anti-depressants, Berardi suggests, are an indication of humanity’s resistance to a system of symbolic production that exploits
subjectivity. As a result, no medicalization of depression can ever hope to successfully treat the root
cause of depression, which lies in the alienated existence of postmodernity. The problem here is striking:
treatments for depression cost money and only further demand that people labor under semiocapitalism to afford their medications
and therapy. It is a race to the bottom in which exploitation and treatment perpetuate each other indefinitely. Berardi suggests a
therapeutic shift towards schizoanalysis, following Deleuze (214-219), which suggests that therapeutics must be an ongoing project
of restoring autonomy in the face of capitalism’s control over desire. One noteworthy omission from this text is the absence of any
consideration of semiocapitalism’s relationship to other capitalisms. While Berardi illustrates the process of
alienation in semiocapitalism, these analyses must be tempered by a recognition that cognitive
labor is not the norm. While globalization may change this over time, we should recognize that
semiocapitalism itself depends upon the more concrete alienation of the physical laborers who
provide food (e.g. de Botton, 2009), etc. For semiocapitalism to be parasitic upon the “souls” of human laborers, it
must also be parasitic upon the bodies of others to perpetuate the physical existence that
underlies the alienation of the soul.
 PSYCHOANALYSIS LINK
What they aspire to as revolutionaries is a new master, and they will get one
Zizek 12 [Slavoj, “Occupy Wall Street: what is to be done next?”//ASherm]
What to do in the aftermath of the Occupy Wall Street movement, when the protests that started far away – in the
Middle East, Greece, Spain, UK – reached the centre, and are now reinforced and rolling out all around the world? In a San
Francisco echo of the OWS movement on 16 October 2011, a guy addressed the crowd with an invitation to participate in it as if it
were a happening in the hippy style of the 1960s: "They are asking us what is our program. We have no
program. We are here to have a good time." Such statements display one of the great dangers the
protesters are facing: the danger that they will fall in love with themselves, with the nice time they are
having in the "occupied" places. Carnivals come cheap – the true test of their worth is what remains the
day after, how our normal daily life will be changed. The protesters should fall in love with hard and patient work
– they are the beginning, not the end. Their basic message is: the taboo is broken, we do not live in the best
possible world; we are allowed, obliged even, to think about alternatives. In a kind of Hegelian triad, the
western left has come full circle: after abandoning the so-called "class struggle essentialism" for the plurality of anti-racist, feminist
etc struggles, "capitalism" is now clearly re-emerging as the name of the problem. The first two things one should
prohibit are therefore the critique of corruption and the critique of financial capitalism. First, let us
not blame people and their attitudes: the problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be
corrupt. The solution is neither Main Street nor Wall Street, but to change the system where Main Street cannot function without
Wall Street. Public figures from the pope downward bombard us with injunctions to fight the culture of excessive greed and
consummation – this disgusting spectacle of cheap moralization is an ideological operation, if there ever was one: the compulsion
(to expand) inscribed into the system itself is translated into personal sin, into a private psychological propensity, or, as one of the
theologians close to the pope put it: "The present crisis is not crisis of capitalism but the crisis of morality."
Let us recall the famous joke from Ernst Lubitch's Ninotchka: the hero visits a cafeteria and orders coffee without cream; the waiter
replies: "Sorry, but we have run out of cream, we only have milk. Can I bring you coffee without milk?" Was not a similar trick at
work in the dissolution of the eastern european Communist regimes in 1990? The people who protested wanted
freedom and democracy without corruption and exploitation, and what they got was freedom
and democracy without solidarity and justice. Likewise, the Catholic theologian close to pope is carefully
emphasizing that the protesters should target moral injustice, greed, consumerism etc, without capitalism. The self-
propelling circulation of Capital remains more than ever the ultimate Real of our lives, a beast
that by definition cannot be controlled. One should avoid the temptation of the narcissism of the
lost cause, of admiring the sublime beauty of uprisings doomed to fail. What new positive order
should replace the old one the day after, when the sublime enthusiasm of the uprising is over? It
is at this crucial point that we encounter the fatal weakness of the protests: they express an
authentic rage which is not able to transform itself into a minimal positive program of socio-
political change. They express a spirit of revolt without revolution. Reacting to the Paris protests
of 1968, Lacan said: "What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a new master. You will get one." It
seems that Lacan's remark found its target (not only) in the indignados of Spain. Insofar as their protest remains at
the level of a hysterical provocation of the master, without a positive program for the new order
to replace the old one, it effectively functions as a call for a new master, albeit disavowed. We got
the first glimpse of this new master in Greece and Italy, and Spain will probably follow. As if ironically answering the lack of expert
programs of the protesters, the trend is now to replace politicians in the government with a "neutral" government of depoliticized
technocrats (mostly bankers, as in Greece and Italy). Colorful "politicians" are out, grey experts are in. This
trend is clearly moving towards a permanent emergency state and the suspension of political
democracy. So we should see in this development also a challenge: it is not enough to reject the depoliticized expert rule as the
most ruthless form of ideology; one should also begin to think seriously about what to propose instead of the predominant economic
organization, to imagine and experiment with alternate forms of organization, to search for the germs of the New. Communism
is not just or predominantly the carnival of the mass protest when the system is brought to a
halt; Communism is also, above all, a new form of organization, discipline, hard work. The protesters should beware not only of
enemies, but also of false friends who pretend to support them, but are already working hard to dilute the protest. In the same
way we get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice-cream without fat, they will try to make the
protests into a harmless moralistic gesture. In boxing, to "clinch" means to hold the opponent's body with one or
both arms in order to prevent or hinder punches. Bill Clinton's reaction to the Wall Street protests is a perfect
case of political clinching; Clinton thinks that the protests are "on balance … a positive thing",
but he is worried about the nebulousness of the cause. Clinton suggested the protesters get behind President
Obama's jobs plan, which he claimed would create "a couple million jobs in the next year and a half". What
one should resist
at this stage is precisely such a quick translation of the energy of the protest into a set of
"concrete" pragmatic demands. Yes, the protests did create a vacuum – a vacuum in the field of hegemonic ideology, and
time is needed to fill this vacuum in in a proper way, since it is a pregnant vacuum, an opening for the truly New. The reason
protesters went out is that they had enough of the world where to recycle your Coke cans, to give a couple of dollars for charity, or to
buy Starbucks cappuccino where 1% goes for the third world troubles is enough to make them feel good. Economic
globalization is gradually but inexorably undermining the legitimacy of western democracies. Due
to their international character, large economic processes cannot be controlled by democratic mechanisms which are, by definition,
limited to nation states. In this way, people more and more experience institutional democratic forms as unable to capture their vital
interests. It is here that Marx's key insight remains valid, today perhaps more than ever: for Marx, the question of freedom
should not be located primarily into the political sphere proper. The key to actual freedom
rather resides in the "apolitical" network of social relations, from the market to the family,
where the change needed if we want an actual improvement is not a political reform, but a change in
the "apolitical" social relations of production. We do not vote about who owns what, about relations in a factory, etc – all this is left
to processes outside the sphere of the political. It is illusory to expect that one can effectively change things by "extending"
democracy into this sphere, say, by organizing "democratic" banks under people's control. In such "democratic" procedures (which,
of course, can have a positive role to play), no matter how radical our anti-capitalism is, the solution is
sought in applying the democratic mechanisms – which, one should never forget, are part of the state apparatuses
of the "bourgeois" state that guarantees undisturbed functioning of the capitalist reproduction. The emergence of an
international protest movement without a coherent program is therefore not an accident: it
reflects a deeper crisis, one without an obvious solution. The situation is like that of psychoanalysis,
where the patient knows the answer (his symptoms are such answers) but doesn't know to what they are
answers, and the analyst has to formulate a question. Only through such a patient work a program will emerge.
In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia. Aaware of how all mail will be
read by censors, he tells his friends: "Let's establish a code: if a letter you will get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if
it is written in red ink, it is false." After a month, his friends get the first letter written in blue ink: "Everything is wonderful here:
stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theatres show films from the west, there are many
beautiful girls ready for an affair – the only thing unavailable is red ink." And is this not our situation till now? We have all the
freedoms one wants – the only thing missing is the "red ink": we feel free because we lack the
very language to articulate our unfreedom. What this lack of red ink means is that, today, all the main terms
we use to designate the present conflict – "war on terror", "democracy and freedom", "human
rights", etc – are false terms, mystifying our perception of the situation instead of allowing us to
think it. The task today is to give the protesters red ink
 CASE
Poetry has to be reduced to semiotics for it to be exchanged – that turns the case
Sturgeon 12 [Jonathon, “On Theory and Finance: Review of Berardi’s "The
Uprising"//ASherm]
The first problem with Berardi’s analogy between poetry and finance is that it bears no relation to the
reality of either. Financial deregulation was not meant to divorce money from matter or value; its
purpose was to get government out of the way of finance. The result, we know from no less than two
financial crises, was not the loss of connection between money and matter, it was the wild
proliferation of connections, of speculative positions taken on anything and everything. Or, as a
financial regulator once told me, “It isn’t the speculation on ‘nothing’ that keeps me up at night, it’s the gambling on all of the things
that matter.” So there was nothing symbolist about the development of modern finance. In Berardi’s
version of symbolism, nothing means anything. In global finance, every signifier is forced to mean something.
Every speculative position is tethered to some good or commodity or service, or some permutation thereof. This is why financial
regulators are trying, and failing, to put limits on the number of positions speculators can take on commodities. What’s worse,
Berardi never identifies the beneficent regulator of symbolist poetry, the good guy we need to
reinstate in order reverse symbolism and bring meaning back to language. Who was such a regulator in
the time of the symbolist poet? Perhaps it was bourgeois morality or the real and violent government censor? Or maybe what we
need is general intellect in high-minded agreement, synchronized en masse by Berardi’s poetics?
The Uprising revels in the commonplace that financial instruments are fictional, as in not real. But if these contracts are merely
“fictional” or “symbolic,” how did they manage to sink the global economy? If the same logic applied to literature, we’d be living in a
world of flesh and blood Hans Castorps, and we would also have very little need for novels or poetry. Speculation leads to failure. In
a contract where one person bets on one thing, and another person bets on its opposite,
someone will lose. No one loses this way in literature (except for the writer blurbed by Jay McInerney). If Berardi is
right about one thing, it is that financial capitalism is semiotic. It thrives on interpretive value,
on the meaning we have too long attributed to money as a medium. More than that, though, finance is
properly aesthetic. The French philosopher Jacques Rancière, a friend to symbolist poets like Mallarmé, has identified the “aesthetic
regime of art” with the period when literary representation broke down. The “aesthetic regime” began when the mass circulation of
novels and poetry reduced the classical hierarchy of roles to a scrapheap. In the aesthetic age—we’re still in it—no
privileged connection between form and social position remains intact; in fact, the emergence of
the aesthetic led us to a moment when everything, even idle matter, can speak. Ours is an age where a
writer can find the whole history of oppression in the mute speech of the Pergamon Altar. The dark underbelly of the
aesthetic or semiotic condition is that it allows for any and every object to become a medium, to
speak for something else. In the case of the financial economy, money has been fetishized—by the
theorist as much as the nefarious financier—as a medium m ore capable of exchange than language. This
mediatization of money is the fever dream of Hofmannsthal’s narrator in his great Letter of Lord Chandos, the work that perhaps
more than any other announced the semiotic age of language: And the whole thing is a kind of feverish thinking, but thinking in a
medium more immediate, more liquid, more glowing than words. The Uprising is a concise, even powerful expression of Lord
Chandos’ nightmare, of the idea that money is hyper-exchangeable whereas poetry is the “language of nonexchangeability.” In this
sense we might consider Berardi’s theory the crystallization of semiotic critique, and we might call
Berardi himself the diamond of theory. Berardi’s book is meant to galvanize “the general
intellect” into believing that poetry is a non-exchangeable form of language. This because Berardi
(admirably) wants us to believe in another world altogether, one we are transported to by poetry as “the excess of language, a hidden
resource which enables us to shift from one paradigm to another.” In Berardi’s work, as in much of contemporary theory, literature
becomes a vanishing mediator, a throwaway wormhole that takes us to another community. But communities must be
built before they are found. Poetry can only build a community if it is exchanged, and
exchangeability lies at the very etymological root of the word literature, of letters shared among friends.
Perhaps it is Berardi’s own semiotization that has led to his alienated view of poetry; it is ironic
that he considers Google to be an evil algorithmic plot driven by semio-capitalism even when his
name registers more than two million search results. The mistakes of The Uprising speak to a much larger crisis
within the evolution of theory in general. In fact, if contemporary finance is analogous to something in literature, it isn’t symbolist
poetry but theory itself. Denationalized, decontextualized, divorced from its origins in philosophy and criticism, theory has assumed
totally deregulated positions on everything from literature to politics and beyond. With its uncountable speculations and tightly
commoditized, catchworded language, theory has become the swaps market of thought.
Bifo can’t account for the way in which bodily energy is still utilized in the third
world
Schnieder 12 [Stephen, “Review of after the future” Published in Democratic Communiqué 25,
No. 2, Fall 2012//ASherm]
The precarization of language has important consequences for political discourse, which shifts from being a vehicle for consensus or
dissent to being instead a form of media spectacle (106). Berardi elaborates these claims by looking at the rise of Silvio Berlusconi
within Italian politics. Berlusconi’s importance lies not in his effective takeover of Italy’s media and
political institutions, but rather in his admission that political discourse has become little more
than idle chatter—at once divorced from political consequence while at the same time central to the creation of capitalist value
(117). Berlusconi thus helps explain not only the way in which Italy has over the last thirty years been a laboratory for semiocapital,
but also the manner in which older forms of political action have been separated from their targets: “[s]peculation and spectacle
intermingle, because of the inflationary (metaphoric) nature of language” (100). For Berardi, this separation has in
turn led to the failure of political activism and the eclipse of social movements, as collective action fails to achieve
autonomy from the political and economic institutions it seeks to challenge (123). Perhaps the most provocative of
Berardi’s claims in this regard is that semiocapital should be understood not just as an economic
formation, but rather as a psychopathology defined by panic, depression, and exhaustion (94).
Stripped of its capacity for political action, and victim of a constant overload of information , the individual lives in a
constant state of panic. But in distinction to the work of other autonomists such as Hardt and Negri,
Berardi is unable to offer a political model for resisting the deleterious consequences of finance
capital. The precarization of labor within cyberculture has itself made social composition—the process of fostering collective
political action—impossible. Instead, “you see actions, but you don’t see an actor” (125). This can be seen, for Berardi, in the failure
of political activism and in the rise of suicide as a viable response to financial and cultural exploitation (148). Berardi is
certainly not without a measure of hope: cognitive labor’s challenge to capitalist theories of
value, and the collective nature of cognitive work, at least hold open the possibility that
“communism is coming back” (151) But beyond that, Berardi argues he is only able to act “as if” older
political models might offer a viable means of resistance (163). But in a world where language has
itself become precarious—at once the primary means of creating value but also an unstable
vehicle for political action—political activism no longer holds the promise it once did. For those
committed to more traditional forms of solidarity and collective action, Berardi’s analysis in After the Future might seem defeatist or
even flippant. Likewise, his failure to outline a meaningful political program in what is quite obviously
intended as a polemic work may leave readers feeling short-changed. Of more concern to readers may be the
manner in which Berardi appears to overlook persistent forms of industrial labor in both the
first and third worlds. These forms of labor have likewise become mobile and increasingly
precarious under finance capital, with jobs being tied to stock prices and shareholder value
rather than production. While this is certainly consistent with—and even assumed within—Berardi’s analysis, left cultural
critics made be left wondering about whether the Democratic Communiqué 25, No. 2, Fall 2012 Reviews / Schneider 45 cognitariat
has really so completely replaced the industrial working class.

Semiocapitalism doesn’t accurately describe psychiatry-egypt disproves

Mal, ’11 [Mal I Sure Hope Bifo Doesn’t Count Vibrators as Tools of Estrangement //ASherm]
Berardi should be the last one to think a brain of any sort is univocal. He’s horrified by Bill Gates’s idea of business at the speed of
thought, but what is the speed of thought really? Brains can be and are used to produce value for the
market, but any friend of Felix Guattari should know brains are chaotic. They produce ideas for the boss, but they
inevitably produce jokes and nightmares as well. Just because capital has organized a social brain
– transcending more spatial and interpersonal barriers than ever before – doesn’t make it the hive’s necessary
owner. The processes that Berardi outlines (“wealth into misery, power into anguish, creativity into dependency”) present the
possibility that it could be otherwise, that there could be a reverse movement. What capital offers is this impoverished multitude, but
we ought not treat this as an offer to be either accepted or refused. 2. I feel pretty derisive about this fear of speed. Certainly a lot of
his critiques about the schizogenic nature of contemporary knowledge-work are valid, but the worry that society is not able to
deliberate “reasonably” at these speeds is misplaced. The swarm has been empirically capable of making
decisions contrary to its instructions in Egpyt, Tunisia, The UK, Wisconsin, etc., and these actions have been
successful to the degree that they’ve been fast and unreasonable. Crisis calls on creativity and
innovation, and sabotage requires the multitude to seize the boss’ networks. In Madison, WI, the Capitol
occupiers are engaged in the sabotage of the labor of citizenship, which is, as Tahrir Square was/is in Egypt, productive of new
relations and subjectivities. Berardi points to the role of prescription drugs in pacifying and
anesthetizing young people as intrinsically related to the speed technology requires, but I’m
willing to bet there are a bunch of students in Madison who may be on Twitter, but haven’t
needed to take their ADD meds. 3. Berardi is old. Besides the “you kids need to slow down” crap, I object to the way he
describes sex as something that requires withdrawal from the (sometimes literal) circuits of production. One need not go to Damn
You Autocorrect to know sexting provides more potential for the play of libidinal flows than a room with two sets of doors gave
Moliere.

Bifo cherry picks examples and ignores broader social progress occurring in the
status quo
Sayarer 15 [Julian, “Cheer up ‘Bifo’—history hasn’t ended yet”//ASherm]
Indeed, were it not that Berardi’s logic were so selective and its perspective so narrow, the book would be
all the more disheartening. Fortunately, also conspicuous is an author who is himself struggling
with the present, soothing his concerns with an easy, leftist lament that envisages no greater role
for humans than that of the happy worker. He raises objections to algorithms (rather than—more helpfully—arguing
that these tools might serve human ends), and wishes for a time when humans made ‘real objects.’ The book also advances
an elementary critique of monetary systems that rightly illustrates the economy of faith that is
currency, but seems only to conclude that some finite resource (such as gold and the gold
standard it once underpinned) might in some way be an improvement. All of this is profoundly
unfortunate, for few would deny that modern work patterns must be made fairer and more human. Early on, Berardi writes:
“History has been replaced by the endless flowing recombination of fragmentary images… frantic precarious activity has taken the
place of political awareness and strategy.” The ironic missed opportunity of Heroes is that in it, the author
has produced only one further recombination: a pastiche of graphic events, mass shootings and
assorted corporate abuses that fall victim to the same shallow lust for spectacle that Berardi
devotes such worthy efforts to decry. Anders Breivik, Virginia Tech, the Aurora Killings, Japanese suicide patterns and
much else besides—modern capitalism has had an enormously detrimental effect on the lives of
billions, and yet a statistically irrelevant number of these sorrows and grievances culminate in
either mass shootings or suicides. Berardi identifies the existence of an iceberg, and yet contents
himself with describing only its very tip. He eschews the banal and the human to focus on the fast-sell of the
sensational, prophesising some coming end rather than taking on the more trying but rewarding task of explaining how things
persist when so much suggests they might fall apart. He explains exceptions delightfully, while seldom
troubling himself with the rule itself, or the norm he condemns. It is this very tendency that must be
redressed, as Berardi probably would agree. He affords no attention to peer to-peer lending, fossil fuel
divestment, credit unions, ethical banking growth, worker co-ops, fair tax certification,
communication expansion through cell phones and the internet, or innovations in mobile
currency. All of these changes are potentially problematic developments that are of course vulnerable to the replication of
old injustices. No less certainly, however, they offer evidence that the status quo Berardi describes is neither
static nor condemned only to change the world for the worse.

Their historical criticism creates the conditions for the system to sustain itself
Baudrillard 88 [Jean, “Necrospective on Martin Heidegger”//ASherm]
In the case of Heidegger we are suddenly discovering his act of intellectual treachery (if such it was) today,
even though we have lived quite happily with it for forty years. We saw the same thing happen with Marx and
Freud. When Marxist thought lost its triumphal aura, people started ferreting about in Marx's life
and dis~ covered that he was a bourgeois who slept with his maid. When psychoanalytic thought began to
lose its uncontested influence, people began looking into Freud's own life and psychology and, inevitably, found he was sexist and
patriarchal. Now we have Heidegger accused of being a Nazi. The fact that he has been so accused
and that efforts are being made to prove his innocence is really of no consequence: both parties
to the quarrel have fallen into the same petty-minded intellectual trap, the trap of an enervated form of
thinking which no longer even takes pride in its own basic tenets, nor has the energy to go beyond them, and which is squandering
what energy it still possesses in historical trials, accusations, justifications and verifications. This is the self-defense of the
philosophical world casting a suspicious eye on the dubious morals of its masters (if not, indeed, trampling them down as 'master-
thinkers'). It is the self-defense of an entire society which is unable to generate a new history and is
hence condemned to keep on re-hashing past history to prove its own existence, or even to prove
its own crimes. But what are we trying to prove? It is because we have disappeared today politically
and historically (this is our real problem) that we want to prove we actually died between I940 and
1945 at Auschwitz or Hiroshima — that at least is a kind of history that really has some weight to it. In this we are
behaving just like the Armenians who never stop trying to prove they were massacred in I917; an
in- accessible, useless proof, but one which is vital to them in a way. It is because philosophy today has disappeared
(that is its problem: how can it live on in a state of disappearance?) that it has to prove that it was definitively
compromised by what Heidegger did or rendered aphasic by Auschwitz. What is happening, then, is a
desperate attempt to snatch a posthumous truth from history, a posthumous exculpation — and
this at a moment when there is precisely not enough truth around to allow us to arrive at any sort of verification, nor enough
philosophy to ground any relation whatever between theory and practice, nor enough history to produce any kind of historical proof
of what happened. We tend all too easily to forget that our reality comes to us through the media, the
tragic events of the past included. This means that it is too late to verify and understand them
historically, for precisely what characterizes our century's end is the fact that the tools of historical intelligibility have
disappeared. History had to be understood while there still was history. Heidegger should have been denounced (or
defended) while there still was time. A trial can only be conducted when there is some way for
justice to be done afterwards. It is too late now; we have been moved on to other things, as we saw when Holocaust was
shown on television, and even when Shoal: was screened. Those phenomena were not understood at the time
when we still had the means to understand them. They will not be understood now. This is so because such
fundamental notions as responsibility, objective cause and the meaning (or non-meaning) of history have already disappeared or are
dis- appearing. The effects of moral conscience, or collective conscience, are entirely media effects,
and you can see from the extraordinary therapeutic effort being made to resuscitate that
conscience how little life is left in it. We shall never know whether Nazism, the concentration camps or Hiroshima were
intelligible or not. We are no longer in the same mental universe. The reversibility of victim and victimizer, the diffraction and
dissolution of responsibility - these are the virtues of our marvelous interface today. We no longer have the strength to
forget; our amnesia is the amnesia of images. Amnesties seem impossible: since everyone is guilty, who could
declare one? As for autopsies, no one believes in the anatomical veracity of facts any more. We work on models. Even if the facts
were there staring us in the face, we would not be convinced. Thus the more we have pored over Nazism and the
gas chambers in an effort to analyses those things, the less intelligible they have become, and we
have in the end arrived quite logically at the improbable question: 'When it comes down to it,
did all these things really exist?‘ The question may be stupid or morally indefensible, but what is
interesting is what makes it logically possible to ask it. And what makes it possible is the way the media have
substituted themselves for events, ideas and his~ tory. This means that the longer you examine these phenomena,
the more you master all the details to identify their causes, the more their existence fades and
the more they come to have not existed at all: a confusion over the identity of things induced by
the very act of investigating and memorizing them. An indifference of memory, an indifference to history that is
exactly equal to the very efforts made to objectify it. One day we shall ask ourselves if Heidegger himself really
existed. Faurisson's paradox' may seem abominable - and, insofar as he claims that the gas chambers did not exist historically, it
is abominable - but in a sense it exactly expresses the situation of an entire culture: the dead-end that our finds-sled:
society has got itself into, fascinated as it is to the point of distraction by the horror of its own
origins. Since it is impossible to forget those origins, the only way out is denial. If proof is futile here, as
there is no historical discourse in which to conduct a trial, punishment is also impossible. Nothing can atone for
Auschwitz and the holocaust. There is no possible way of fitting the punishment to the crime, and the unreality of possible
punishment makes the facts themselves seem unreal. What we are living through has nothing to do with all this. What is
happening right now, collectively, confusedly, in all these trials and polemics is the transition
from the phase of history to a phase of myth. We are seeing the mythic reconstruction, the media reconstruction, of
all these events. And in a sense this mythic conversion is the only operation which can, if not perhaps morally exculpate us, at least
absolve us in fantasy of responsibility for this original crime. But before this process can take place, before a
crime can become a myth, the crime has first to be divested of its historical reality. Otherwise, since
we have been, and still are, unable to come to terms historically with all these things - fascism, concentration camps, the holocaust -
we would be condemned to repeat them eternally as a primal scene. It is not nostalgia for fascism which is
dangerous. What is dangerous and lamentable is this pathological revival of the past, in which
everyone — both those who deny and those who assert the reality of the gas chambers, both Heidegger's critics and his supporters
- is currently participating (indeed virtually conniving), this collective hallucination which transfers the
power of imagination that is lacking from our own period, and all the burden of violence and
reality which has today become merely illusory, back to that earlier period in a sort of
compulsion to relive its history, a compulsion accompanied by a profound sense of guilt at not having been there. All this
is a desperate emotional response to the realization that the events in question are currently eluding us at the level of reality. The
Heidegger affair, the Barbie trial etc. are the pathetic little convulsions produced by the loss of
reality that afflicts us today, and Faurisson's propositions are simply the cynical transposition of that loss of reality into
the past. Faurisson's 'none of this ever existed' quite simply means that we do not even exist enough today to sustain a memory, and
that all that remains to give us a sense of being alive are the techniques of hallucination.

Calling for the ballot re-affirms the status quo

Campbell 98 [David, “Performing Politics and the Limits of Language, Theory & Event”]
Those who argue that hate speech demands juridical responses assert that not only does the
speech communicate, but that it constitutes an injurious act. This presumes that not only does speech act, but
that "it acts upon the addressee in an injurious way" (16). This argumentation is, in Butler's eyes, based upon a
"sovereign conceit" whereby speech wields a sovereign power, acts as an imperative, and
embodies a causative understanding of representation. In this manner, hate speech constitutes its subjects as
injured victims unable to respond themselves and in need of the law's intervention to restrict if not censor the offending words, and
punish the speaker: This idealization of the speech act as a sovereign action (whether positive or negative)
appears linked with the idealization of sovereign state power or, rather, with the imagined and forceful voice
of that power. It is as if the proper power of the state has been expropriated, delegated to its citizens,
and the state then rememerges as a neutral instrument to which we seek recourse to protects as
from other citizens, who have become revived emblems of a (lost) sovereign power (82). Two
elements of this are paradoxical. First, the sovereign conceit embedded in conventional renderings of hate speech comes at a time
when understanding power in sovereign terms is becoming (if at all ever possible) even more difficult. Thus the juridical
response to hate speech helps deal with an onto-political problem: "The constraints of legal language emerge to put
an end to this particular historical anxiety [the problematisation of sovereignty], for the law requires that we resituate power in the
language of injury, that we accord injury the status of an act and trace that act to the specific conduct of a subject" (78). The second,
which stems from this, is that (to use Butler's own admittedly hyperbolic formulation) "the state produces hate speech." By this she
means not that the state is the sovereign subject from which the various slurs emanate, but that within the frame of the
juridical account of hate speech "the category cannot exist without the state's ratification, and this
power of the state's judicial language to establish and maintain the domain of what will be
publicly speakable suggests that the state plays much more than a limiting function in such
decisions; in fact, the state actively produces the domain of publicly acceptable speech,
demarcating the line between the domains of the speakable and the unspeakable, and retaining
the power to make and sustain the line of consequential demarcation" (77). The sovereign conceit
of the juridical argument thus linguistically resurrects the sovereign subject at the very moment
it seems most vulnerable, and reaffirms the sovereign state and its power in relation to that
subject at the very moment its phantasmatic condition is most apparent. The danger is that the resultant
extension of state power will be turned against the social movements that sought legal redress in the first place (24)

Bifo’s analysis is reductive and over-totalizing

Pursley 10 [Mike, “From Alienation to Autonomy by Franco "Bifo" Berardi”//ASherm]
Here’s a taste of some of the most abstract: “The infinite capacity of replication of the recombining simulator device erases the
originality of the event.” Or how about: “The productive finalization of technology ends up subjugating the
thinking process from the standpoint of its own epistemological structures.” Indeed. Capitalism,
and his absolute distaste for it, is where Bifo makes himself absolutely clear. It’s the catch-all cause for
all modern strife, a “pathogenic mechanism” that is the ruin of everything. Preaching “liberation from capitalism” is where the
author will most likely loose all but the most radical of readers. The capitalist system is clearly not without faults,
but presenting it as scapegoat for every ill we face may be too simple. At times Bifo seems a cranky
old curmudgeon madly shaking his fist at the present. This is the Bifo that bemoans “collective mental pollution”
and says of the world: “too many signs, too fast, too chaotic.” His qualms with hyperreal society are at times a
good diagnosis of our problems, but the prescribed anti-capitalist panacea remains
questionable. For all the theory involved to make his case, Bifo’s solution is strangely and kind of
awesomely underwhelming. We are urged to reconsider how wealth is defined, to focus more on
friendships and an easygoing life rather than profits. Who but Henry Ford himself could argue
with that? The volume ends with a few thoughts on the current Great Recession, where the collapse of the economy “can be read
as the return of the soul.” For that, we will have to see.
MORE BIFO THINGS
 AT: WORLD GETTING BETTER / CAP GOOD
Even if capitalism was good, we are at the dawn of a new age, capitalist absolutism,
and things are getting and about to get war worse. Semiocapitalism produces
financial deregulation, in which speculation requires rising poverty,
unemployment, cuts to welfare, and cataclysmic environmental catastrophe to
sustain and accelerate financial growth
Bifo 15 [Francesco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Professor of Social History of Communication at the
Accademia di Belle Arti of Milan, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide, Verso: Brooklyn, NY,
2015, p. 89-92]

Absolute Capitalism
How should we define the contemporary economic system?
I reject the expression ‘cognitive capitalism’, since only labour can be defined as cognitive. Capital is
not the subject of cognitive activity: it is only its exploiter. The bearer of knowledge,
creativity and skills is the cognitive worker.
I also avoid the definitions of ‘monetarism’ and of ‘neoliberal capitalism’, which seem to me to be inaccurate despite
their widespread use. The variation in money supply was only a technical aspect, and Neoliberalism only the ideological justification,
of an epochal transformation that took place in the last decades of the twentieth century.
In the context of a long-term anthropological evolution, contemporary capitalism can be understood as the
turning point beyond the age of Humanism. The modern bourgeoisie embodied the values of Humanist freedom
from theological destiny, and bourgeois capitalism was a product of the Humanist revolution. But the combined effect of a
preponderance of capital accumulation and of the deterritorialization of the production process have led to the end of the bourgeois
characterization of the economic system. The production and exchange of abstract signs has taken the
predominant place in the overall process of accumulation: semiocapitalism has taken the
place of industrial capitalism. Financial abstraction is only the extreme manifestation of the
predominance of semiosis in comparison with physical production.
Semiocapitalism is, for me, a suitable definition of the present economic system at the global level.
However, if we intend to grasp the political dimension of the transformation that Neoliberal deregulation has
brought about, I think that it would be more correct to speak of ‘capitalist absolutism’.
The English word ‘absolute’ descends from the Latin ab-solutus, a term translatable as ‘emancipated from any limitation’. In this
context, ‘absolute’ means not limited by restrictions, unconditional, unconstrained by
constitutional or other provisions.
The bourgeoisie fought a battle against early modern absolutism, after taking advantage of the
effects of national unification and social regulation that absolutist monarchs enforced on traditional societies. The
bourgeois struggle against monarchic absolutism was part of the battle for the liberation of privately owned enterprise from the
control of the state, but also for the limitation of the monarch’s actions under the rule of law.
Once it managed to impose the rule of law over the power of the feudal aristocracy and of the monarch, the bourgeoisie also accepted
a legal limitation to its own economic expansion. The bourgeoisie could not be indifferent to the destiny of the territory or the
community of workers, which was obviously linked to the destiny of its own investments. Workers and the bourgeoisie shared the
same urban space, and the same future. If the economy crumbled, it was a disgrace also for the owner, although it was a much worse
disgrace for the workers and their families.
This is why the bourgeois class accepted the democratic deal, and the negotiation with the working
class. The rise of financial capitalism, the deterritorialization of production and exchange, and finally the emergence of
a virtual class without territorial identity have been accompanied by a general process of deregulation.
The globalization of corporate trade hindered and rendered impossible any all-encompassing legal control on their activity. The
sovereignty of nation states made way for global corporations acting with absolute freedom ,
disregarding the local authority and shifting their immaterial assets from one location to
another. This is particularly evident in reference to the environmental crisis, as the legal
limits to the exploitation of physical resources and the pollution of the environment are
systematically (and ultimately, suicidally) ignored by corporations.
At the same time, the globalization of the labour market destroyed the unionized power of workers, and opened
the way to a general reduction of salaries, increased exploitation and the erosion of regulations
covering working conditions and working hours. This is why I believe that the contemporary global
system should be defined as one of absolute capitalism, in which the only effective principles are those of value-accumulation,
profit-growth and economic competition.
These are its all-encompassing priorities, and the overwhelming impetus at its core. All other
concerns, including the survival of the planet or the future of the next generation, are subsumed
to these greater goals.
Compared to the past situation of bourgeois industrial capitalism, the relationship between social welfare and
financial profit is now inverted. In the industrial economy, profits increased when citizens
acquired enough money to buy the goods that were produced in the factories. In the sphere of
financial capitalism, financial indicators go up only if social welfare crumbles and salaries
fall.
Unsurprisingly, those few hundred billionaires listed in Forbes magazine have hugely increased their
capital in 2010, 2011 and 2012, years which were dramatically marked by rising
unemployment, poverty and cuts to social welfare.
Far from emancipating society from any rule, Neoliberal deregulation has emancipated capital from the
political law and social needs, while subjecting society to the blind adherence to the law of
financial accumulation. It has marked the beginning of an age of capitalist absolutism, in which
capital accumulation and particularly financial accumulation are entirely independent (ab-solutus,
untied) from the social interest.
In this way, the Humanist tradition, which was based on the idea that human destiny is not subjected to any theological law or
necessity, is finally obliterated.

The bourgeoisie has disappeared: in the regime of semiocapitalism, there’s

nothing to rebel against. Their replacement, the “elsewhere class,” engages in a
constant reterritorialization of random financial value that makes effective
resistance impossible.
Bifo 15 [Francesco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Professor of Social History of Communication at the
Accademia di Belle Arti of Milan, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide, Verso: Brooklyn, NY,
2015, p. 76-80]

Semiocapital and the Ethics of Baroque

Crime used to be a secret act. In the age of repression and industriousness, when the morality of the bourgeoisie was reigning, crime
wanted to be secret. Law aimed at preventing crime, and it encouraged investigations of criminals in order to punish them.
This order of things has irrevocably changed in the last turn of time, especially since the advent of the semiocapitalist regime.
Semiocapitalism occupies the sphere of randomness of value, as well as the sphere of
randomness of law and of moral judgement.
The entire strategy of the system lies in this hyper-reality of floating values. It is the same for
money and theory as for the unconscious. Value rules according to an ungraspable order: the generation of
models, the indefinite chaining of simulation. Cybernetic operationality, the genetic code, the random order
of mutations, the principle of uncertainty, and so on: all of these replace a determinist and objectivist
science, a dialectical vision of history and consciousness.1
Baudrillard is talking of value in economic terms. In the post-Fordist transition, the relation between work-time and value is
jeopardized, as immaterial production and cognitive work are difficult to properly gauge. But the random effect is not limited to the
sphere of the economy, as it spreads both to the sphere of social relations and to that of ethics.
The current, generalized perception of widespread corruption is neither a superficial
impression, nor the effect of a deterioration of the moral character of people.
It is a systemic effect of the randomization of value. When value can no longer be
determined by the precise relation to work-time, its determinant factors become deception,
swindle, violence. Mafia ceases to be a marginal phenomenon of lawlessness, instead becoming the prevailing force of
emerging capitalist economies like Russia and Mexico. At the same time, fraud is legalized and organized in the
global financial market as a systemic feature.
As it becomes increasingly institutionalized, crime loses its secrecy and demands access to the spectacle. The
visibility of crime becomes part of the effectiveness and persuasiveness of power. Competition is
all about subduing, cheating, predating. Blaming the victims is part of the game: you are guilty of
your inability to subdue, to cheat and to plunder, therefore you will be submitted to the
blackmail of debt and to the tyranny of austerity.
Nazism already enacted spectacular crime as a means to secure absolute power, but the criminal acts conducted in the name of the
‘Final Solution’ were secretly organized and performed away from the public eye. Evil was proclaimed and
simultaneously denied in the name of the superior values of family, homeland and God. On the
contrary, reclaiming evil has become commonplace in today’s financial markets, as the old
ethics of bourgeois Protestantism is progressively cancelled by the neobaroque, post-bourgeois
ethics of the deterritorialized financial class.
The bourgeoisie was a strongly territorialized class, whose power was based on the property of physical assets, and on the fact of
belonging to a stable community. Protestant ethics was based on the long-lasting relationship between the religious community and
the labourers and consumers who shared the same place and the same destiny.
Nowadays, the bourgeoisie has disappeared. The financial deterritorialization is generating a post-bourgeois
class, which has no relation to the territory and to community.
It is a class that is not concerned with the future of any specific territorial community, because tomorrow it will move its business to
a different part of the world. We might call it the ‘elsewhere class’, as it continuously displaces the stakes of its
investment. But we may also call it a ‘virtual class’, for two reasons: because it is the class that gains
profits from virtual activities, like net trading, and high tech immaterial production; and because it is
the class that does not actually exist. Identifying those who are investing in the financial market is
difficult, impossible, as everybody is obliged to depend on it.
In a sense, everybody is part of the class that is investing in the financial market. Including myself. As a
teacher I am bound to wait for a pension, and I know that my pension will be paid if some
investment funds will be profitable, therefore I am obliged to depend for my future revenue
on the profitability of the financial market. The ‘elsewhere class’ has re-established the
economic rationale of the rentier, as profit is no longer linked to the expansion of the existing
wealth, but is linked to the mere possession of an invisible asset: money, or, more accurately, credit.
According to Thomas Stewart:
Money has dematerialized. Once upon a time officials of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York were
loading gold bars onto trolleys and rolled them from one country’s basement to another. Today
some 1.3 trillion in currency is traded every day, and never takes a tangible form.
Money has turned ethereal, volatile and electronic. Nothing more than an assemblage of ones
and zeros that are piped through miles of wire, pumped over fiberoptic highways, bounced off
satellites, and beamed from one microwave relay station to another. This new money is like a
shadow. It has no tactile dimension, no heft or weight. Money is an image.2
The post-bourgeois class of virtual finance has no homeland, no community, no
belonging, and also no money. Just faith. Faith in signs, in figures. The post-bourgeois class
announces the return of the baroque.
Although defeated and marginalized during the age of bourgeois progress and the rational organization of social life, the baroque has
never disappeared.
Its spirit is based on the primacy of the spectacle, on the multiplication of possible
interpretations, on randomness of value and of meaning, or the potency of arbitrary and
violent will. Not surprisingly, Curzio Malaparte, a writer who took part in Italian Fascism before changing his position during
the Second World War, in Europa vivente, published in 1925, speaks of Italian Fascism as a return of the baroque. Northern
Europeans are wrong to think that modernity is only a Protestant business, says Malaparte. Fascism is the reclaiming of the modern
soul of Southern Europeans, and the political spectacle of Mussolini is the resurgence of the baroque cult of inessentiality,
decoration, excess: arbitrary power.
But arbitrariness is not only a defining feature of Fascism, it is also the quintessential
character of the semio capitalist form of accumulation. The power of the resurgent baroque is fully
exposed by the transformation of the economy into semioproduction. When language,
imagination, information and immaterial flows become the force of production and the
general space of exchange, when property is deterritorialized and becomes immaterial, the
baroque spirit becomes the all-encompassing form, both of the economy and of ethical
discourse.
The worker has disappeared --- the lack of spatial proximity and continuity
between workers denies the possibility of class solidarity fomenting meaningful
resistance. Moreover, Marx’s economic theory understands labor as divisible into
discrete units of time, but the floating, arbitrary value of money combined with the
depersonalization of time means today’s cognitive worker no longer has no
discrete surplus-value to be stolen
Bifo 15 [Francesco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Professor of Social History of Communication at the
Accademia di Belle Arti of Milan, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide, Verso: Brooklyn, NY,
2015, p. 138-42]

The recombinant alliance of cognitive work and financial capital was over. The young
army of free agents, selfexploiters and virtual prosumers was transformed into modernity’s
horde of precarious cognitive workers: cognitarians, cognitive proletarians and internet-slaves
who invest nervous energy in exchange for a precarious revenue.
Precarity is the general condition of semio-workers. The essential feature of precarity in
the social sphere is not the loss of regularity in the labour relation, since labour has always been
more or less precarious, notwithstanding legal regulations. The essential transformation induced by the
digitalization of the labour process is the fragmentation of the personal continuity of work, the
fractalization and cellularization of time. The worker disappears as a person, and is replaced by
abstract fragments of time. The cyberspace of global production can be viewed as an immense expanse of depersonalized human
time. In the sphere of industrial production, abstract labour time was embodied in a worker of
flesh and bone, with a certified and political identity. When the boss was in need of human time for capital
valorization, he was obliged to hire a human being, and was obliged to deal with the physical
weaknesses, maladies and rights of this human being; was obliged to face trade unions reclaims and the political demands of
which the human was a bearer.
As we move into the age of info-labour, there
is no longer a need to invest in the availability of a person for
eight hours a day throughout the duration of his or her life. Capital no longer recruits people, but buys
packets of time, separated from their interchangeable and occasional bearers. In the internet economy,
flexibility has evolved into a form of fractalization of work.
Fractalization is the modular and recombinant fragmentation of the period of activity. The
worker no longer exists as a
person. He or she is only an interchangeable producer of micro-fragments of recombinant semiosis that enter into the continuous
flux of the internet. Capital no longer pays for the availability of a worker to be exploited for a long period of time; it no longer pays a
salary that covers the entire range of economic needs of a person who works.
The worker (a machine endowed with a brain that can be used for fragments of time) is paid for his or her occasional, temporary
services. Work time is fragmented and cellularized. Cells of time are put up for sale online, and businesses can purchase as many of
them as they want without being obligated in any way to provide any social protection to the worker. Depersonalized time
has become the real agent of the process of valorization, and depersonalized time has no rights,
no union organization and no political consciousness. It can only be either available or unavailable – although
this latter alternative remains purely theoretical inasmuch as the physical body still has to buy food and pay rent, despite not being a
legally recognized person.
The time necessary to produce the info-commodity is liquefied by the recombinant digital
machine. The human machine is there, pulsating and available, like a brainsprawl in waiting. The extension of time is
meticulously cellularized: cells of productive time can be mobilized in punctual, casual and fragmentary forms. The recombination of
these fragments is automatically realized in the network. The mobile phone is the tool that makes possible the
connection between the needs of semiocapital and the mobilization of the living labour of
cyberspace. The ringtone of the mobile phone summons workers to reconnect their abstract time to the reticular flux.
In this new labour dimension, people have no right to protect or negotiate the time of which they are
formally the proprietors, but are effectively expropriated. That time does not really belong to
them, because it is separated from the social existence of the people who make it available to the
recombinant cyber-productive circuit. The time of work is fractalized, reduced to minimal fragments that can be
reassembled, and the fractalization makes it possible for capital to constantly find the conditions of the minimal salary.
Fractalized work can punctually rebel, here and there, at certain points – but this
does not set into motion any concerted endeavour of resistance.
Only the spatial proximity of the bodies of labourers and the continuity of the
experience of working together lead to the possibility of a continuous process of
solidarity. Without this proximity and this continuity, the conditions for the cellularized bodies
to coalesce into community do not pertain. Individual behaviours can only come together to
form a substantive collective momentum when there is a continuous proximity in time, a
proximity that info-labour no longer makes possible.
Cognitive activity has always been involved in every kind of human production, even that of a more mechanical type. There is no
process of human labour that does not involve an exercise of intelligence. But today, cognitive capacity is
becoming the essential productive resource. In the age of industrial labour, the mind was put to work as a
repetitive automatism, the neurological director of muscular effort. While industrial work was essentially repetition of physical acts,
mental work is continuously changing its object and its procedures.
Thus, the subsumption of the mind in the process of capitalist valorization leads to a true mutation. The conscious and
sensitive organism is subjected to a growing competitive pressure, to an acceleration of stimuli,
to a constant exertion of his/her attention. As a consequence, the mental environment, the info-sphere in which
the mind is formed and enters into relations with other minds, becomes a psychopathogenic
environment.
To understand semiocapital’s infinite game of mirrors, we must first outline a new disciplinary
field, delimited by three aspects: the critique of political economy of connective intelligence; the
semiology of linguistic-economic fluxes; and the psychochemistry of the info-sphere, focused on
the study of the psychopathological effects of the mental exploitation caused by the acceleration
of the info-sphere.
In the connected world, the retroactive loops of general systems theory are fused with the dynamic logic of biogenetics to form a
post-human vision of digital production. Human minds and flesh are integrated with digital circuits thanks
to interfaces of acceleration and simplification: a model of bio-info production is emerging that
produces semiotic artefacts with the capacity for the auto- replication of living systems. Once
fully operative, the digital nervous system can be rapidly installed in every form of organization.
The digital network is provoking an intensification of the info-stimuli, and these are transmitted
from the social brain to individual brains. This acceleration is a pathogenic factor that has
wide-ranging effects in society. Since capitalism is wired into the social brain, a psychotic meme of
acceleration acts as pathological agent: the organism is drawn into a spasm until collapse.
 1NC BIFO K (VS IDENTITY)
Their aff’s fidelity to the liberation or political potential symbolized by identitarian
markers hypostatizes identity as a primeval source of meeting, concretizing
artificial constructions of the past that ultimately provoke violent
reterritoritializion
Bifo 15 [Francesco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Professor of Social History of Communication at the
Accademia di Belle Arti of Milan, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide, Verso: Brooklyn, NY,
2015, p. 121-6]

Identity and Identification

In the 1980s Goldstein had been an activist of the Kach Party, an openly racist, anti-Arab right-wing organization founded in Israel
by Rabbi Meir Kahane. Later, as a doctor, Goldstein gained notoriety in Israel because he refused to treat Arabs who needed medical
attention. After receiving his assignment as a military doctor, he told his commanders that his religious faith did not allow him to
treat wounded or ill Arabs, including those who served in the Israel Defense Forces. His superiors decided not to punish his refusal,
but merely to reassign him to South Lebanon.
It would be as unfair to read Goldstein’s crime as an expression of the Orthodox Israeli culture. But we have to read madness in its
context, and we can read the crime as a symptom of that malady that goes under the name of
identity.
Identity is not naturally ascribed; it is a cultural product: it is the effect of the
hypostatization (fixation and naturalization) of the cultural difference, of the psychological, social and linguistic
particularity. Identity is continuity and confirmation of the place and of the role of a speaker
in the cycle of communication. In order to be understood, one must play one’s role in the
game, and this role is surreptitiously identified as a mark of belonging.
But identity is continually searching for its roots, and the place from whence the enunciation
comes is often mistaken as one of natural origins: primeval and therefore undeniably true.
The community, which is a place of communication (a place of exchange of signs conventionally charged of
meaning), is mistaken as a natural place of belonging, and transformed into the primeval
source of meaning. The temporary and transitional convention that gives meaning to signs is strengthened and
transformed into the natural mark or motivated relation between sign and meaning.
Identity may be seen as the hardening of the inner map of orientation. Identity is the
opposite of style, which is singularity and consciousness of the singularity, a map of
orientation flexible and adaptable, retroactively changing. Style never has a normative
feature, nor implies any kind of interdiction and punishment. Identity is a limitation
(unconsciously realized) upon the possibility of comprehension and interaction. It is a useful limitation, of
course, but it is dangerous to mistake it as a condition of authenticity and primeval belonging. It is
the condition of mutual aggressiveness, of racism and violence, and fascism.
Identity is based on a hypertrophic sense of the root, and it leads to the reclamation of
belonging as criterion of truth and of selection.
Identity is the perceptual and conceptual device that gives us the possibility of knowledge, but
sometimes we mistake this knowledge for a re-cognition. So we are led to believe that
which we already know, that we possess a map thanks to our belonging. This can be useful sometimes, but
it is dangerous to mistake our cultural map for the inner territory of belonging . Without a map,
one gets lost, but getting lost is the beginning of the process of knowledge; it is the
premise for creating any map.
In their book Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Resolution, the psychoanalysts Watzlawick, Weakland and Fisch write
that the repeated application of the same solution in drastically different conditions is a neurotic attitude which leads to pathological
situations.
Observed within the context of the current global dynamic of deterritorialization–re-territorialization, such neuroticism
emerges as a constitutive component of today’s world order. On the one hand, globalization and the
acceleration of cultural and economic exchanges have increased the need for the flexible
adaptation of conceptual and linguistic maps. Yet at the same time, paradoxically, the
deterritorialization that globalization entails hugely intensifies the need for an identitarian shelter,
the need for the confirmation of belonging. Here lies the identitarian trap which is
leading the world towards the proliferation of points of identitarian aggressiveness: the
return of concepts such as the homeland, religion and family as aggressive forms of
reassurance and self-confirmation.
We can also read this dynamic in terms of technomutation and ethno-mutation. On the one hand,
information technology has provoked the acceleration and intensification of semiotic exchanges,
and on the other hand, the displacement of people and massive waves of economic and political
migration have provoked an unprecedented change in the ethnic landscape of the territories , with
all the concomitant cultural contamination and intermixing. In conditions of competition, these processes tend to excite
the need for identitarian belonging, and to give way to identitarian aggressiveness.
According to Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, universal history can be viewed as a process of deterritorialization.
Deterritorialization is the passage from a space whose code is known to a new space, where that
code loses its meaning, so that things become unrecognizable for anyone attempting to use the
code that was produced by the previous territory. The history of capitalism is continuously producing effects of
deterritorialization.
At the outset, capitalism destroyed the old relation between the individual and both the agricultural
territory and the family. Subsequently, it jeopardized the national borders and created a global space
of exchange and communication. Currently, it is jeopardizing the very relation between money and
production, and opening the way to a new form of immaterial semiotization. As capitalism
destroys all forms of identification, it frees the individuals from the limitations of
identity, but simultaneously it provokes a sense of displacement, a sort of opacity that is
attributable to the loss of previous meanings and emotional roots. As a result, capitalism ultimately
provokes a need for reterritorialization, and a continual return of the past in the
shape of national identities, ethnic identities, sexual identities, and so on.
Modern history is a process of forgetting that provokes an effect of anguish and that forces
people to desperately hold onto some kind of memory. But memory has faded, together with the
dissolution of the past, such that people have to invent a new set of memories. Like the character
Rachel in the 1982 neo-noir sci-fi film Blade Runner, people create their own memories, putting together pieces of old
texts, of faded images, of words whose meaning is lost.
‘Memory is right’, said Chaim Weizmann, when summoned to the Congress of Versailles by the victors of the Second
World War, in reference to the right of Jewish people to reclaim the land of their ancestors.2
Weizmann’s assertion, which was fundamental for the creation of the state of Israel, today sounds like
an arrogant provocation. Memory is not right, but it is part of an identity, and identity is not based on
memory; rather, identity creates memory.
Milan Kundera writes the following about the future and the past :
People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It’s not true. The future is an
apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to
destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.
They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and
biographies and histories rewritten.3
Contrary to common belief, the past is far from unchangeable. The past only exists in our
minds, and therefore it takes new shapes as we distance ourselves from it, and as we displace the
viewpoint from which we are remembering.
‘Memory is right’ was not only a provocation, it was a declaration of war, as different memories conflict. The creation
of Israel is based on Weizmann’s contention that memory is right, and the never-ending war
between Israel and Palestinians is based on the arbitrary identification of memory and right.

That re-territorializion explodes into aggressive violence --- the deceptive trap of
identity enables global antagonisms to maintain a state of permanent war
Bifo 15 [Francesco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Professor of Social History of Communication at the
Accademia di Belle Arti of Milan, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide, Verso: Brooklyn, NY,
2015, p. 101-4]
At issue here are the essential features of what is generally called fundamentalism, but might
better be defined as an identitarian obsession: the self-identification as the ‘chosen people’, which
implies as its complementary opposite the identification of the other as the enemy of the
truth and of the good – that is, the personification of evil.
Fascism and Nazism
The terms Fascismand Nazism are often used as ambiguous signifiers. Their meaning is vaguely
referable to extreme oppression, violence and authoritarianism, but it is difficult to define
exactly what is meant by these provocative identifiers. Any historical overview of the first part of the twentieth
century provides its own damning verdict on these political ideologies, but attempts to extract a general meaning from the thinking
of Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler and their followers often founder in a labyrinth of identification.
What, in fact, is Fascism? In an article about Ur-Fascism,
Umberto Eco writes:
Fascism had no quintessence. Fascism was a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different
philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions. Can one conceive of a truly totalitarian
movement that was able to combine monarchy with revolution, the Royal Army with Mussolini’s personal milizia, the grant of
privileges to the Church with state education extolling violence, absolute state control with a free market? The Fascist Party was born
boasting that it brought a revolutionary new order; but it was financed by the most conservative among the landowners who
expected from it a counter-revolution.
At its beginning fascism was republican. Yet it survived for twenty years proclaiming its loyalty to the royal family, while the Duce
(the unchallenged Maximal Leader) was arm-in-arm with the King, to whom he also offered the title of Emperor. But when the King
fired Mussolini in 1943, the party reappeared two months later, with German support, under the standard of a ‘social’ republic,
recycling its old revolutionary script, now enriched with almost Jacobin overtones.6
I would argue that Fascism is difficult to identify for the simple reason that its core is exactly the
obsession of identification. Rather than specific national, religious or ethnic identities, it is the very
process of national identification, religious identification and ethnic identification that has led
to dangerous historical game-playing, often culminating in war and slaughter.
Indeed, in order to deny all possibility of becoming a Fascist, one ought first to resist any
pressure to identify oneself. Unfortunately, it is not always particularly easy to avoid
identification, particularly when social survival is threatened, as all other people become
essentially competitors in the labour market or competitors in the occupation of territory. It is
not easy to escape identification when the social community is attacked and people are unable to
organize themselves around their interests and political rights, particularly when social solidarity
is weak or entirely abrogated. In these instances, people understandably experience the need to find a
point of identification in the phantoms of identitarian belonging – and identitarian
belonging cannot find any foundation but aggressiveness toward other groups.
These dynamics of identification and aggression can be better explored if we acknowledge the differences between the historical
regimes of Italian Fascism and German Nazism, and relate them to what is happening in the current century. These differences are
illuminated under consideration of the baroque Catholic cult of the inclusive community (il fascio, the bunch, the union of those who
are part of the same ‘populus’ and of the same nation) and the Gothic racist cult of the exclusive Volk. Nazism is essentially based on
the negation of the human nature of the other, while Fascism is based on the aggressive inclusion of the other, and the punishment
and extermination of those who refuse to be included.
Regarding the traces of extremism evident in the first decade of the twenty-first century, I would contend that Nazism is embodied
by the social-Darwinist cult of competition and the subjugation of the human nature of those who perish as a result of the ‘natural
selection’ of the market. Italian Fascism, on the other hand, is revived in the modern age by the resentful and
vengeful spirit of the losers, those who are marginalized in the economic game of competition
and who react under the banners of cultural identification. The present war between Western
absolute capitalism and Islamic fundamentalism may be viewed as a war between Nazism and
Fascism. This war is going to indelibly stain future decades, unless some – currently
unimaginable – political invention will come to free us from this cultural killing
field.
Financial capitalism is based on a process of unrelenting deterritorialization, and this is
causing fear to spread among those who are unable to deal with the precariousness of daily life
and the violence of the labour market. This fear in turn provokes a counter-effect of
aggressive re-territorialization by those who try to grasp some form of identity,
some sense of belonging, because only a feeling of belonging offers the semblance
of shelter, a form of protection. But belonging is a delusive projection of the mind, a
deceptive sensation, a trap. Since one’s belonging can only be conclusively proved by an act
of aggression against the other, the combined effect of deterritorialization in the sphere of
financial capitalism and of re-territorialization in the realm of identity is leading to a
state of permanent war.

Voting negative recognizes that, when confronted with the paradoxes presented by
contemporary politics, your only remaining choice is to decode chaos. This
recognition aligns your energies with the possibility of a different order of mental
processing that refuses the affective terrain of semiocapitalism. Don’t play the
game, give up your attachment to sociopolitical change, and above all, do not hope.
Bifo 15 [Francesco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Professor of Social History of Communication at the
Accademia di Belle Arti of Milan, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide, Verso: Brooklyn, NY,
2015, p. 221-6]

As consciousness is too slow for processing the information that comes from the world in
acceleration (info-technology multiplied by semiocapitalist exploitation), we are unable to translate the
world into a cosmos, mental order, syntony and sympathy.
A transformation is needed: a jump to a new refrain, to a new rhythm; chaosmosis is the shift
from a rhythm of conscious elaboration (refrain) to a new rhythm, which is able to process what
the previous rhythm could not process.
A shift in the speed of consciousness, the creation of a different order of mental
processing: this is chaosmosis. In order to shift from a rhythm to a different rhythm, from a refrain to another
refrain, Guattari says we need a ‘chaoide’, a living decoder of chaos.
Chaoide, in Guattari’s parlance, is a sort of de-multiplier, an agent of re-syntonization, a linguistic agent
able to disengage from the spasmic refrain. The chaoide is full of chaos, receives and
decodes the bad vibrations of the planetary spasm, but does not absorb the negative
psychological effects of chaos, of the surrounding aggressiveness, of fear.
The chaoide is an ironic elaborator of chaos. ‘The ecosophical cartography’, writes
Guattari, ‘will not have the finality of communicating, but of producing enunciation concatenations
able to capture the points of singularity of a situation’.
5 Where are today’s concatenations that offer conscious organisms the possibility of emerging
from the present spasmogenic framework, the framework of financial capitalism?
The rhythm that financial capitalism is imposing on social life is a spasmogenic rhythm, a spasm
that is not only exploiting the work of men and women, not only subjugating cognitive labour to
the abstract acceleration of the info-machine, but is also destroying the singularity of
language, preventing its creativity and sensibility. The financial dictatorship is essentially the
domination of abstraction on language, command of the mathematical ferocity on living
and conscious organisms.
This is why we need to produce and to circulate chaoides, that is, tools for the conceptual
elaboration both of the surrounding and of the internalized chaos.
A chaoide is a form of enunciation (artistic, poetic, political, scientific) which is able to open the linguistic
flows to different rhythms and to different frames of interpretation.
Chaosmosis means reactivation of the body of social solidarity, reactivation of imagination, a
new dimension for human evolution, beyond the limited horizon of economic growth .
Writing this book, I intended to produce a chaoide.
Dealing with crime and suicide, I have been dealing with the contemporary spasm, and I have tried to decipher the social and
cultural genesis of the present pathology. At the same time, I have tried to breathe normally, while staring into the eyes of the beast.
Dyst-irony
It’s not easy to harmonize your breathing to the cosmic breath, when people are suffering
around you and you feel guilty in one sense or another for their pain – because you know that
your job is to find a solution, a therapy, a way out – and you are unable to say what should be
done.
Jackie Orr writes in Panic Diaries:
In an exquisite sense of contagious connectivity, paranoia is one form that a felt insistence on the social and historical structuring of
psychic experience can take. Paranoia ‘knows well’ the resonant evidence suggesting that everything really is connected, the psyche
and the power of the social, a small white pill and a wildly historical story.6
Paranoia ‘knows well’, but we need to free ourselves from the effects of that knowledge in order
to disentangle from it the possibility of invention, of richness, of happiness and the good life.
In the last few decades, artistic sensibility has been paralysed by a sense of paranoiac enchantment:
psychic frailty, fear of precariousness and the premonition of a catastrophe that is impossible to
avoid. This is why art has become so concerned with suicide and crime. This is why, very often, crime and suicide (most of all
suicidal crime) have been modelled as art.
Now all this paranoia has to be disposed of. All that I have been writing of in this horrible book is already out
of fashion.
Let’s forget about it; let’s go forward.
Dystopia has to be faced and dissolved by irony.
If paranoia ‘knows well’, we need a method of ignorance.
We need to assume some distance from what seems to be inscribed as an imminent-immanent
tendency in the present cartography of events. The spectrum of the possible is much larger than the range of
probability.
We need to correct dystopia with irony, because irony (far from being cynical alliance with power)
is the excess of language that opens the door to the infinity of the possible.
I strongly dislike doomsayers, those gloomy prophets who want to spread the message that
humanity is close to extinction and that we must all repent for our misdeeds.
I have little more time for those hysterical enemies of political corruption who see conspiracies
and hidden projects of evil everywhere, and absolutely want to revolutionize the world.
Frankly, I don’t think that political awareness is going to prove the best medicine for
our current malady. Most people know that financial dictatorship is destroying
their life; the problem is knowing what to do about it. It is possible that nothing can
be done, that power has become so deeply entrenched in the automatisms regulating daily life,
connecting our interchanges, and infiltrating our words, that bio-financial control cannot be undone, or
avoided.
So what can be done when nothing can be done?
I think that ironic autonomy is the answer. I mean the contrary of participation, I mean
the contrary of responsibility, I mean the contrary of faith. Politicians call on us to take
part in their political concerns, economists call on us to be responsible, to work more, to go
shopping, to stimulate the market. Priests call on us to have faith. If you follow these
inveiglements to participate, to be responsible – you are trapped. Do not take part in
the game, do not expect any solution from politics, do not be attached to things, do
not hope.
Dystopian irony (dyst-irony) is the language of autonomy.
Be sceptical: do not believe your own assumptions and predictions (or mine).
And do not revoke revolution. Revolt against power is necessary even if we may not know how
to win.
Do not belong. Distinguish your destiny from the destiny of those who want to belong and to
participate and to pay their debt. If they want war, be a deserter. If they are enslaved but
want you to suffer like them, do not give in to their blackmail.
If you have to choose between death and slavery, don’t be a slave. You have some chance to
survive. If you accept slavery, you will die sooner or later anyway. As a slave.
You will die anyway; it is not particularly important when. What is important is how you live
your life.
Remember that despair and joy are not incompatible.
Despair is a consequence of understanding. Joy is a condition of the emotional mind. Despair is
to acknowledge the truth of the present situation, but the sceptical mind knows that the only
truth is shared imagination and shared projection. So do not be frightened by despair. It does
not delimit the potential for joy. And joy is a condition for proving intellectual despair wrong.
 2NC RACE/IDENTITY LINK
Identity requires the validating the gaze of the other as the source of identitarian
relations --- this elevates a culturally mediated origin to the realm of dogmatic
truth, fomenting an obsession with belonging that entrenches neoliberal precarity
in place of internationalist solidarity
Bifo 15 [Francesco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Professor of Social History of Communication at the
Accademia di Belle Arti of Milan, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide, Verso: Brooklyn, NY,
2015, p. 127-9]

Obliged to dissimulate their rituals and beliefs, Spanish Jews gradually lost the memory of their
cultural references, then, when they could flee to more tolerant regions and cities (such as Amsterdam) they
resumed their search for their religious identity. But much of their memory had been lost in the
decades of persecution and dissimulation, and often, the interdiction of the persecutors appeared to be the only evidence
of its previous existence. Paradoxically, what the persecutors had forbidden, increasingly came to be
perceived as the ‘true’ identity which had been lost, and consequently, enacting exactly that which
had been forbidden appeared to be the safest way to retrace and reappropriate the
original identity, to rebuild the collective memory. This is the essence of the trap of
identity: only the gaze of the other acts as a mirror, as the source of self-
identification. The obsession of primitive identity is an impasse, because the truth about one’s
being is possessed by one’s enemy, and only the transgression of the oppressor’s interdiction
leads to the core of one’s belonging. People’s memory is largely rooted in this trap, in this
double bind. African Americans and Armenians, Tibetans and Tamils – all these populations
have been denied the living relation with their tradition, only to find it in the eyes of
their oppressors.
The working class did have a chance to escape this trap, which links modernity and tradition in a double bind. It is not by chance
that Jews have been integral to the formation of the worker’s consciousness in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, just as it is
not by chance that the resurgence of Jewish identitarianism follows the defeat of the workers’ revolution. The worker class
has no roots and no identity. Shifting from the condition of farmer to the condition of industrial
worker means forgetting about identitarian roots. This is the condition of the
universal principle of emancipation that is called internationalism.
Internationalism is not abstract moral solidarity, mere political will. It is the effect of the
condition of work without quality, the condition of abstract work. As a consequence of this condition of radical
alienation, industrial workers have been able to create the cultural conditions of equality. Industrial
workers know that they are equals in their loss of humanity, of life, of time, of difference. It is
through this alienation that difference can be reconstructed as consciousness, not as memory,
as a political process of solidarity, not as belonging to an imagined origin.
Since the working class was defeated by precariousness and the globalization of the labour market, the
Volk has returned, stupid and bloody as it is, bringing with it the curse of origins, the
obsession with belonging.
In his book La Défaite de la pensée, Alain Finkielkraut rightly laments the fading of universal reason as the foundation of law and
social structure, and the the re-emergence of identitarian culture and belonging. When relativism becomes
culturalism, when belonging is mistaken as the foundation of law (‘memory is right’), when
workers’ internationalism is defeated, modern universalism dies, and Humanism dies with it.
Only the global, idiotic proliferation of particularities remains: crime and suicide .
 2NC PATRIARCHY IMPACT
Turns patriarchal and colonial oppression --- semiocapitalism integrates an attack
on the patriarchal family while maintaining a restoration of patriarchal law
Bifo 15 [Francesco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Professor of Social History of Communication at the
Accademia di Belle Arti of Milan, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide, Verso: Brooklyn, NY,
2015, p. 106-7]

What is the primary meaning of ’68? After two world wars, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in
1968, young people,
students, workers, intellectuals and women asserted, among other things, that humans must
emancipate from mental slavery, and that mental slavery is essentially based on subordination
to the Father. The authority of the father was viewed not only as the key tool of patriarchal
oppression, but also of colonial violence and of capitalist exploitation. Seen through the
prism of 1968, refusing and defusing the authority of the father, the transmission of its
oppressive law and the obedience to its traditions was the first step in a social and sexual
liberation from slavery. In the following two decades, society attempted and often succeeded in creating
fraternal links of solidarity and freeing itself from patriarchal subjection. That little trace of this
social transformation is evidence today can be accredited to the Neoliberal counter-
offensive, which swiftly destroyed social solidarity, obliterating the fraternal link
with the law of competition. Since then, restoring the law of the father has been the
main concern of popes, ayatollahs and neo-conservative alike.
Yet at the same time, capitalism in the age of deregulation has globalized the markets and mixed
languages, deterritorialized production and culture, and therefore jeopardized the patriarchal
family and the authority of the Father by ushering in a territory of the unconscious . This is why
the contemporary cultural power is deeply schizogenic: it is simultaneously reclaiming
authority and destroying authoritativeness.
Anders Breivik is the standard-bearer of all the anticommunists of the world, all the fanatics of the
capitalist Restoration, which is, first and foremost, the Restoration of the patriarchal
law. But he is also very much troubled by the role of the Father(s).
 2NC PERMUTATION
Refuse any investment in the illusions of political belonging, community, or
change simulated by the affirmative. This seductive force may be alluring, but the
frantic precarious labor has replaced political possibility. The alternative is our
only option left for a replacement to Art, politics, and therapy alike.
Bifo 15 [Francesco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Professor of Social History of Communication at the
Accademia di Belle Arti of Milan, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide, Verso: Brooklyn, NY,
2015, p. 4-7]

In the classical tradition, the hero belonged to the sphere of the epic imagination, separate from
tragedy and lyrics. The hero was someone who subjugated Nature and dominated the events of
history with the strength of will and of courage. He founded the city and warded off the demonic
forces of chaos. This vision can still be found in the time of the Renaissance, and Machiavelli’s prince can be
considered the hero of modern political narration: the man who establishes the nation state,
builds the infrastructures of industry and gives shape to a common identity.
This epic form of heroism disappeared towards the end of modernity, when the complexity
and speed of human events overwhelmed the force of the will. When chaos prevailed,
epic heroism was replaced by gigantic machines of simulation. The space of the epic
discourse was occupied by semiocorporations, apparatuses for the emanation of widely shared
illusions. These games of simulation often took the shape of identities, as with popular
subcultures like rock, punk, cyberculture and so on. Here lies the origin of the late-modern form of tragedy: at
the threshold where illusion is mistaken for reality, and identities are perceived as
authentic forms of belonging. It is often accompanied by a desperate lack of irony, as
humans respond to today’s state of permanent deterritorialization by enacting their craving for
belonging through a chain of acts of murder, suicide, fanaticism, aggression, war. I
believe that it is only through irony and through a conscious understanding of the
simulation at the heart of the heroic game, that the simulated hero of subculture
still has a chance to save itself.
4
In the year 1977 human history came to a turning point. Heroes died, or, better said, they
disappeared. They were not killed by the foes of heroism, rather they transferred to another dimension: they dissolved, they
turned into ghosts. So the human race, misled by mock heroes made of deceptive electromagnetic
substance, lost faith in the reality of life and its pleasures, and started believing only in the
infinite proliferation of images. 1977 was the year when heroes faded and transmigrated from the world of
physical life and historical passion to the world of visual simulation and nervous stimulation. That year was a watershed: from the
age of human evolution the world shifted to the age of de-evolution, or de-civilization.
What had been produced by labour and social solidarity in the centuries of modernity started to
fall under finance’s predatory process of de-realization. The conflictive alliance between
industrious bourgeois and industrial workers – which had left the public education system, health care,
transportation, and welfare as the material legacy of the modern age – was sacrificed to the religious dogma of
the Market-God.
In the second decade of the twenty-first century the post-bourgeois dilapidation took the form of a financial
black hole. This new system started to swallow and destroy the product of two hundred years of
industriousness and of collective intelligence, and transformed the concrete reality of
social civilization into abstraction: figures, algorithms, mathematical ferocity and accumulation of nothing in the form
of money. The seductive force of simulation transformed physical forms into vanishing
images, submitted visual art to spam spreading, and subjected language to the fake regime of
advertising. At the end of this process, real life disappeared into the black hole of
financial accumulation.
The question now is to see what’s left of the human subjectivity and sensibility and of our
ability to imagine, to create and to invent. Are humans still able to emerge from this
black hole; to invest their energy in a new form of solidarity and mutual help? The
sensibility of a generation of children who have learned more words from machines than from
their parents appears to be unable to develop solidarity, empathy and autonomy.
History has been replaced by the endless flowing recombination of fragmentary
images. Random recombination of frantic precarious activity has taken the place of
political awareness and strategy. I really don’t know if there is hope beyond the black hole;
if there lies a future beyond the immediate future.
Where there is danger, however, salvation also grows – said Hölderlin, the poet most loved by Heidegger, the
philosopher who foresaw the future destruction of the future. Now, the task at hand is to map the wasteland
where social imagination has been frozen and submitted to the recombinant corporate
imaginary. Only from this cartography can we move forward to discover a new form
of activity which, by replacing Art, politics and therapy with a process of re-
activation of sensibility, might help humankind to recognize itself again.
AFF FRAMEWORK SUPPLEMENT
Leo
 LEGAL SUBJECTIVITY DA
Framework re-entrenches the western conception of the legal subject,
sharpening the necropoltical knife of lawfare and exporting massive
violence across the globe
Comaroff and Comaroff 07. John Comaroff, Professor of African and African
American Studies and of Anthropology, Oppenheimer Fellow in African Studies at at Harvard,
and Jean Comaroff, Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology,
Oppenheimer Fellow in African Studies also at Harvard, “Law and disorder in the postcolony,”
Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (2007) 15, pg. 144 //LS
Nor is it just the politics of the present that are being judicialised. As we said earlier, the past, too, is being fought out
in the courts. Britain, for example, is currently being sued for acts of atrocity in its African empire (Anderson 2005; Elkins
2005): for having killed local leaders, unlawfully alienated territory from one African people to another, and so on.33 By these
means is colonialism itself rendered criminal. Hauled before a judge, history is
made to submit to the scales of justice at the behest of those who suffered it . And to be
reduced to a cash equivalent, payable as the official tender of damage, dispossession, loss, trauma. What imperialism is
being indicted for, above all, is its commission of lawfare : the use of its own penal
codes, its administrative procedures, its states of emergency, its charters and
mandates and warrants, to discipline its subjects by means of violence made
legible and legal by its own sovereign word. Also, to commit its own ever-so-civilised forms of kleptocracy.¶
Lawfare – the resort to legal instruments, to the violence inherent in the law, to commit acts of political coercion, even erasure
(Comaroff 2001) – is equally marked in postcolonies. As a species of political displacement, it becomes
most visible when those who ‘serve’ the state conjure with legalities to act against
its citizens. Most infamous recently is Zimbabwe, where the Mugabe regime has consistently passed laws to justify the
coercive silencing of its critics. Operation Murambatsvina, ‘Drive Out Trash’, which has forced political opponents out of urban areas
under the banner of ‘slum clearance’ – has recently taken this practice to unprecedented depths. Murambatsvina, says the
government, is merely an application of the law of the land to raze dangerous ‘illegal structures’.¶ Lawfare may be
limited or it may reduce people to ‘bare life’; in Zimbabwe, it has mutated into a
necropolitics with a rising body count . But it always seeks to launder visceral power
in a wash of legitimacy as it is deployed to strengthen the sinews of state or enlarge
the capillaries of capital. Hence Benjamin’s (1978) thesis that the law originates in violence and
lives by violent means; that the legal and the lethal animate one another . Of course, in 1919
Benjamin could not have envisaged the possibility that lawfare might also be a weapon of the weak, turning authority back on itself
by commissioning courts to make claims for resources, recognition, voice, integrity, sovereignty.¶ But this still does not lay to rest the
key questions: Why the fetishism of legalities? What are its implications for the play of
Law and Dis/order in the postcolony? And are postcolonies different in this
respect from other nation-states?¶ The answer to the first question looks obvious. The
turn to
law would seem to arise directly out of growing anxieties
about lawlessness . But this does not explain the
displacement of the political into the legal or the turn to
the courts to resolve an ever greater range of wrongs. The
fetishism, in short, runs deeper than purely a concern with crime. It has to do with the very constitution
of the postcolonial polity. Late modernist nationhood, it appears, is undergoing an epochal
move away from the ideal of cultural homogeneity: a nervous, often xenophobic
shift toward heterogeneity (Anderson 1983). The rise of neoliberalism – with its impact on population flows, on the
dispersion of cultural practices, on geographies of production and accumulation – has heightened this, especially in former colonies,
which were erected from the first on difference. And difference begets more law. Why? Because, with growing
heterodoxy, legal instruments appear to offer a means of commensuration (Comaroff
and Comaroff 2000): a repertoire of standardised terms and practices that permit the
negotiation of values, beliefs, ideals and interests across otherwise intransitive
lines of cleavage. Hence the flight into a constitutionalism that explicitly embraces
heterogeneity in highly individualistic, universalistic Bills of Rights, even where
states are paying less and less of the bills. Hence the effort to make human rights
into an ever more global, ever more authoritative discourse.¶ But there is something else at work
too. A well-recognised corollary of the neoliberal turn, recall, has been the outsourcing by states of many of the conventional
operations of governance, including those, like health services, policing and the conduct of war, integral to the management of life
itself. Bureaucracies do retain some of their old functions, of course. But most 21st
century governments have reduced their administrative reach, entrusting ever
more to the market and delegating ever more responsibility to citizens as
individuals, as volunteers, as classes of actor, social or legal. Under these conditions,
especially where the threat of disorder seems immanent, civil law presents itself as
a more or less effective weapon of the weak, the strong and everyone in between.
Which , in turn, exacerbates the resort to lawfare . The court has become a utopic site
to which human agency may turn for a medium in which to pursue its ends . This, once
again, is particularly so in postcolonies, where bureaucracies and bourgeoisies were not elaborate to begin with; and in which
heterogeneity had to be negotiated from the start.¶ Put all this together and the
fetishism of the law seems
over-determined . Not only is public life becoming more legalistic, but so, in
regulating their own affairs and in dealing with others, are ‘communities’ within
the nation-state: cultural communities, religious communities, corporate
communities, residential communities, communities of interest, even outlaw
communities. Everything , it seems, exists here in the shadow of the law . Which also
makes it unsurprising that a ‘culture of legality’ should saturate not just civil order but also its criminal undersides. Take another
example from South Africa, where organised crime appropriates, re-commissions and counterfeits the means and ends of both the
state and the market. The gangs on the Cape Flats in Cape Town mimic the business world, having become a lumpen stand-in for
those excluded from the national economy (Standing 2003). For their tax-paying clients, those gangs take on the positive functions
of government, not least security provision. Illicit corporations of this sort across the postcolonial world often have shadow judicial
personnel and convene courts to try offenders against the persons, property and social order over which they exert sovereignty. They
also provide the policing that the state either has stopped supplying or has outsourced to the private sector. Some have constitutions.
A few are even structured as franchises and, significantly, are said to offer ‘alternative citizenship’ to their members.35 Charles Tilly
(1985) once suggested, famously, that modern states operate much like organised crime. These days, organised crime is operating
ever more like states.¶ Self-evidently, the counterfeiting of a culture of legality by the criminal
underworld feeds the dialectic of law and disorder. After all, once government
outsources its policing services and franchises force, and once outlaw
organisations shadow the state by providing protection and dispensing justice,
social order itself becomes like a hall of mirrors . What is more, this dialectic has its own
geography. A geography of discontinuous, overlapping sovereignties.¶ We said a moment
ago that communities of all kinds have become ever more legalistic in regulating their
affairs; it is often in the process of so doing, in fact, that they become communities at
all, the act of judicialisation being also an act of objectification. Herein lies their will to sovereignty,
which we take to connote the exercise of autonomous control over the lives, deaths
and conditions of existence of those who fall within its purview – and the
extension over them of the jurisdiction of some kind of law . ‘ Lawmaking’ , to cite
Benjamin (1978: 295) yet again, ‘ is power making .’ But ‘power is the principal of all lawmaking’.
In sum, to transform itself into sovereign authority, power demands an architecture
of legalities . Or their simulacra.

Their political strategy further the liberal logic of resilient living ---- their
depictions of inevitable global catastrophes that results in unbound nihilism --- all
we can do is cope with our portable decision-making skills
Evans and Reid 15 [Brad Evans is a Senior Lecturer in International relations at the School of Sociology, Politics &
International Studies (SPAIS), University of Bristol, Julian has taught International Politics and International Relations at the
Universities of London where he has occupied the Chair in International Relations since 2010, “Exhausted by resilience: response to
the commentaries,” Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses, April 7, 2015]/MR
Beneath the veneer of concern with security
For us, the political and philosophical stakes could not have been more pronounced.

from death, violence and everyday dangers, we argued lurks a deeply nihilistic way of thinking about the very nature of
what it is to live. Resilience has created an image of a world in which the very phenomena of violence and insecurity are assumed as natural and incontestable.
All things are insecure by design. In a sense, then, resilience, in conceiving the world as such, does immense
violence to our very sensibilities concerning the possibility of ever achieving meaningful peace and
security. The real tragedy for us is the way the doctrine forces us to become active participants in our own
de-politicisation. Resilience encourages us to learn from the violence of catastrophic events
so that we can become more responsive to further catastrophes on the horizon. It
promotes adaptability so that life may go on living despite experiencing certain
destruction. Indeed it even demands a certain exposure to the threat before its occurrence so that we can be better prepared. Resilience as such appears to be a
form of immunisation. We internalise the catastrophic to the creation of new epistemic communities that are more aware of their vulnerabilities. What is more, setting aside
resilience looks to the future as an endemic terrain of
any utopian vision of a promissory world that may be conceived otherwise,

catastrophe that is already populated by the ruins of the present. We argued that there was a distinct lethal
principle at work here, which is profoundly different to that of sovereignty. While the lethality of sovereignty is invested in the ability to annihilate the other, resilience exposes
the self to a dose of lethality to stave off something altogether more terminal. In this regard, it proves to be a form of selfannihilation insomuch as lethality is internalised to
be a resource for knowledge and understanding that may be drawn upon. What does not kill you only makes you stronger, providing of course you are trained in the art of
resilience now authenticates who we are as people. Adaptability in the face of crisis emphasises
survival. Our thesis has been that

Such reasoning
our resourcefulness, our abilities to thrive in times of risk and our life-affirming qualities that refuse to surrender to all forms of endangerment.

we maintained is fully compatible with neoliberalism and its promotion of risk, along with its private

commitment to the care for the self. It is precisely through the promotion of ontologies of vulnerability instead of ontologies of oppression that
we learn to accept that things are simply crises ridden and ultimately catastrophically fated. In short,
while globalisation comes to us in many forms, the forces that bring about change are quite literally out of our hands. This inevitably brings us to the question of bio-politics
today. Students will appreciate that we have written extensively about the bio-politics of security, war and violence. Further, as we argued in the book, the bio-politics of today is
not the bio-politics of Michel Foucault. Indeed, whilst we accept that resilience is a novel form of bio-political intervention that suspends life in a system of temporal purgatory –
our concern is to rid ourselves of the nihilism of contemporary liberalism, most
catastrophically fated unto the end – if

we must look to develop new modes of subjectivity

purposefully expressed in the logic of the bio-politics of resilience,

beyond the bio-political reckoning. This is not a call to ‘forget Foucault’ (whatever that may mean). Foucault is not read widely enough. We have
never been convinced by those who would reduce Foucault to the ‘question of truth’, without ever engaging with his evident courage to truth as aptly titled in a recently
transcribed lecture series. Nor have we been convinced by those who claim that bio-politics is a reified paradigm divorced from the everyday operations of power. Power, as
Foucault always maintained, is as multiple as the problem of life itself. Our deployment of the bio-political analytic has always retained this methodological commitment to
What is liberalism after all
address the micro-physics of power and how this builds up into universal claims to truth that are globally expansive in ambition.

if not some planetary vision for political order premised upon the need to
foreground ‘life itself’ as central to all political strategies? We are however tired of addressing the political failures of
liberal modernity. Its claims to improve and enrich human existence have proved to be unfounded. It betrays a terrible deceit as deliverance of security, peace and justice
we are also exhausted by
echoes the continued calls for catastrophe, war and profound suspicion on the nature of the subject. And to repeat,

resilience. It nihilism is devastating. Its political language enslaving. Its modes of subjectivity
lamenting. And its political imagination notably absent . That is why we have decided after this volume to never write, publicly
lecture or debate the problematic again. We will not engage with those who would have us brought into some dialectical orbit in order to validate its reverence by making it some
master signifier in order to prove its majoritarian position. Yes, the doctrine of resilience at the level of policy and power is ubiquitous. And yet in terms of emancipating the
political, it is already dead.

The process of liberal subject formation is the nexus point of modern violence.
Liberalism’s defense of rights is easily manipulated into a biopolitical protection of
life itself, which then seeks to cleanse all the areas of political difference. War is
thus the essential feature of the liberal encounter.
Evans 10. Brad Evans, Lecturer in the School of Politics and International Studies at the University of Leeds and Programme
Director for International Relations, "Foucault’s Legacy: Security, War, and Violence in the 21st Century," Security Dialogue vol.41,
no. 4, August 2010, pg. 422-424, sage/MR

Imposing liberalism has often come at a price. That price has tended to be a continuous recourse to war.
While the militarism associated with liberal internationalization has already received scholarly attention (Howard, 2008), Foucault was concerned more with the
continuation of war once peace has been declared.4 Denouncing the illusion that ‘we are living in a world in which order and peace have been restored’ (Foucault, 2003:
disrupt the neat distinctions between times of war/military exceptionalism and times
53), he set out to

of peace/civic normality. War accordingly now appears to condition the type of peace that follows. None have been more ambitious in map-- ping out this war–peace
continuum than Michael Dillon & Julian Reid (2009). Their ‘liberal war’ thesis provides a provocative insight into the lethality of making live. Liberalism today, they argue, is
underwritten by the unreserved righteousness of its mission. Hence, while there may still be populations that exist beyond the liberal pale, it is now taken that they should be
included. With ‘liberal peace’ therefore predicated on the pacification/elimination of all forms of political difference in order that liberalism might meet its own moral and
political objectives, the more peace is commanded, the more war is declared in order to achieve it: ‘In proclaiming peace . . . liberals are nonetheless committed also to
making war.’ This is the ‘martial face of liberal power’ that, contrary to the familiar narrative, is ‘directly fuelled by the universal and pacific ambitions for which liberalism is
to be admired’ (Dillon & Reid, 2009: 2). Liberalism thus stands accused here of universalizing war in its pursuit of peace: However much liberalism abjures war, indeed finds the
instrumental use of war, especially, a scandal, war has always been as instrumental to liberal as to geopolitical thinkers. In that very attempt to instrumentalize, indeed
universalize, war in the pursuit of its own global project of emancipation, the practice of liberal rule itself becomes profoundly shaped by war. However much it may proclaim
liberal peace and freedom, its own allied commitment to war subverts the very peace and freedoms it proclaims (Dillon & Reid, 2009: 7). While Dillon & Reid’s thesis only makes
veiled reference to the onto-- theological dimension, they are fully aware that its rule depends upon a certain religiosity in the sense that war has now been turned into a
veritable human crusade with only two possible outcomes: ‘endless war or the transformation of other societies and cultures into liberal societies and cul-- tures’ (Dillon & Reid,
2009: 5). Endless war is underwritten here by a new set of problems. Unlike Clausewitzean confrontations, which at least provided the strategic comforts of clear demarcations
(them/us, war/peace, citizen/soldier, and so on), these wars no longer benefit from the possibility of scoring outright victory, retreating, or achieving a lasting negotiated peace
by means of political compromise. Indeed, deprived of the prospect of defining enmity in advance, war itself becomes just as complex, dynamic, adaptive and radically
interconnected as the world of which it is part. That is why ‘any such war to end war becomes a war without end. . . . The project of removing war from the life of the species
becomes a lethal and, in principle, continuous and unending process’ (Dillon & Reid, 2009: 32). Duffield, building on from these concerns, takes this unending scenario a stage
further to suggest that since wars for humanity are inextricably bound to the global life--chance divide, it is now possible to write of a ‘Global Civil War’ into which all
life is openly recruited: Each crisis of global circulation . . . marks out a terrain of global civil war, or rather a tableau of wars, which is fought on and between the modalities
of life itself. . . . What is at stake in this war is the West’s ability to contain and manage international poverty while maintaining the ability of mass society to live and consume
liberalism
beyond its means (Duffield, 2008: 162). Setting out civil war in these terms inevitably marks an important depar-- ture. Not only does it illustrate how

gains its mastery by posing fundamental questions of life and death – that is, who is to live and who
can be killed – disrupting the narrative that ordinarily takes sovereignty to be the point of theoretical departure, civil war now appears to be driven by a globally ambitious
biopolitical imperative (see below). Liberals have continuously made reference to humanity in order to justify their use of military force (Ignatieff, 2003). War, if there is to be
one, must be for the unification of the species. This humanitarian caveat is by no means out of favour. More recently it underwrites the strategic rethink in contemporary zones
of occupation, which has become biopolitical (‘hearts and minds’) in everything but name (Kilcullen, 2009; Smith, 2006). While criticisms of these strategies have tended to
focus on the naive dangers associated with liberal idealism (see Gray, 2008), insufficient attention has been paid to the contested nature of all the tactics deployed in the will to
govern illiberal populations. Foucault returns here with renewed vigour. He understood that forms of war have always been aligned with forms of life. Liberal wars are no
exception. Fought in the name of endangered humanity, humanity itself finds its most meaningful expression through the battles waged in its name: At this point we can invert
Clausewitz’s proposition and say that politics is the continuation of war by other means. . . . While it is true that political power puts an end to war and establishes or
attempts to establish the reign of peace in civil society, it certainly does not do so in order to suspend the effects of power or to neutralize the disequilibrium revealed in the last
battle of war (Foucault, 2003: 15). What in other words occurs beneath the semblance of peace is far from politically settled: political struggles, these clashes over and with
power, these modifications of relations of force – the shifting balances, the reversals – in a political system, all these things must be interpreted as a continuation of war.
And they are interpreted as so many episodes, fragmentations, and displacements of the war itself. We are always writing the history of the same war, even when we are writing
the history of peace and its institutions (Foucault, 2003: 15). David Miliband (2009), without perhaps knowing the full political and philo-- sophical implications, appears to
subscribe to the value of this approach, albeit for an altogether more committed deployment: NATO was born in the shadow of the Cold War, but we have all had to change our
thinking as our troops confront insurgents rather than military machines like our own. The mental models of 20th century mass warfare are not fit for 21st century
counterinsurgency. That is why my argument today has been about the centrality of politics. People like quoting Clausewitz that warfare is the continuation of politics by other
means. . . . We need politics to become the continuation of warfare by other means. Miliband’s ‘Foucauldian moment’ should not escape us. Inverting Clausewitz on a planetary
scale – hence promoting the collapse of all meaningful distinctions that once held together the fixed terms of Newtonian space (i.e. inside/outside, friend/enemy, citizen/soldier,
war/peace, and so forth), he firmly locates the conflict among the world of peoples. With global war there-- fore appearing to be an internal state of affairs, vanquishing enemies
the destiny of humanity as a whole is
can no longer be sanctioned for the mere defence of things. A new moment has arrived, in which

being wagered on the success of humanity’s own political strategies. No coincidence, then, that
authors like David Kilcullen – a key architect in the formulation of counterinsurgency strategies in Iraq and Afghanistan, argue for a global insurgency paradigm without too
much controversy. Viewed from the perspective of power, global insurgency is after all nothing more than the advent of a global civil war fought for the biopolitical spoils of life.
Giving primacy to counter-- insurgency, it foregrounds the problem of populations so that questions of security governance (i.e. population regulation) become central to the war
effort (RAND, 2008). Placing the managed recovery of maladjusted life into the heart of military strategies, it insists upon a joined--up response in which sovereign/militaristic
forms of ordering are matched by biopolitical/devel-- opmental forms of progress (Bell & Evans, forthcoming). Demanding in other words a planetary outlook, it collapses the
local into the global so that life’s radical interconnectivity implies that absolutely nothing can be left to chance. While liberals have therefore been at pains to offer a more
humane recovery to the overt failures of military excess in current theatres of operation, warfare has not in any way been removed from the species. Instead, humanized in the
name of local sensitivities, doing what is necessary out of global species necessity now implies that war effectively takes place by every means. Our understanding of civil war is
invariably recast. Sovereignty has been the traditional starting point for any discussion of civil war. While this is a well-established Eurocentric narrative, colonized peoples have
never fully accepted the inevitability of the transfixed utopian prolificacy upon which sovereign power increasingly became dependent. Neither have they been completely
passive when confronted by colonialism’s own brand of warfare by other means. Foucault was well aware of this his-- tory. While Foucauldian scholars can therefore rightly
argue that alternative histories of the subjugated alone permit us to challenge the monopolization of political terms – not least ‘civil war’ – for Foucault in particular there was
something altogether more important at stake: there is no obligation whatsoever to ensure that reality matches some canonical theory. Despite what some scholars may insist,
politically speaking there is nothing that is necessarily proper to the sovereign method. It holds no distinct privilege. Our task is to use theory to help make sense of reality, not
vice versa. While there is not the space here to engage fully with the implications of our global civil war paradigm, it should be pointed out that since its biopolitical imperative
removes the inevitability of epiphenomenal tensions, nothing and nobody is necessarily dangerous simply because location dictates. With enmity instead depending upon
what becomes dangerous emerges from within the
the complex, adaptive, dynamic account of life itself,

liberal imaginary of threat. Violence accordingly can only be sanctioned against those newly
appointed enemies of humanity – a phrase that, immeasurably greater than any juridical category, necessarily affords enmity an internal quality

inherent to the species complete, for the sake of planetary survival. Vital in other words to all human existence, doing what is necessary
out of global species necessity requires a new moral assay of life that, pitting the universal against the particular, willingly commits violence against any ontological
commitment to political difference, even though universality itself is a shallow disguise for the practice of destroying political adversaries through the contingency of particular
encounters. Necessary Violence Having established that the principal task set for biopolitical practitioners is to sort and adjudicate between the species, modern societies reveal
a distinct biopolitical aporia (an irresolvable political dilemma) in the sense that making life live – selecting out those ways of life that are fittest by design – inevitably writes
into that very script those lives that are retarded, backward, degenerate, wasteful and ultimately dangerous to the social order (Bauman, 1991). Racism thus appears here to be a
thoroughly modern phenomenon (Deleuze & Guattari, 2002). This takes us to the heart of our concern with biopolitical rationalities. When ‘ life itself’ becomes
the principal referent for political struggles, power necessarily concerns itself with those
biological threats to human existence (Palladino, 2008). That is to say, since life becomes the author of its own (un)making, the biopolitical
assay of life necessarily portrays a commitment to the supremacy of certain species types: ‘a race that is portrayed as the one true race, the race that holds

power and is entitled to define the norm, and against those who deviate from that norm, against
those who pose a threat to the biological heritage’ (Foucault, 2003: 61). Evidently, what is at stake here is no mere sovereign affair.
Epiphenomenal tensions aside, racial problems occupy a ‘permanent presence’ within the political order (Foucault, 2003: 62). Biopolitically speaking, then, since it is precisely
through the internalization of threat – the constitution of the threat that is now from the dangerous ‘Others’ that exist within – that societies reproduce at the level of life the
one always
ontological commitment to secure the subject, since everybody is now possibly dangerous and nobody can be exempt, for political modernity to function

has to be capable of killing in order to go on living: Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who
must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life
necessity;massacres have become vital . . . . The principle underlying the tactics of battle – that one has to become capable of killing in order to go on
living – has become the principle that defines the strategy of states (Foucault, 1990: 137). When Foucault refers to ‘killing’, he is not simply referring to the vicious act of taking
another life: ‘When I say “killing”, I obviously do not mean simply murder as such, but also every form of indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the
Racism makes this process of
risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection and so on’ (Foucault, 2003: 256).

elimination possible, for it is only through the discourse and practice of racial (dis)qualification that one is capable of introducing ‘a break in the domain
of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die’ (Foucault, 2003: 255). While kill- ing does not need to be physically murderous, that is
not to suggest that we should lose sight of the very real forms of political violence that do take place in the name of species improvement. As Deleuze (1999: 76) duly noted,
when notions of security are invoked in order to preserve the destiny of a species, when the defence of society gives sanction to very
real acts of violence that are justified in terms of species necessity, that is when the capacity to legitimate
murderous political actions in all our names and for all our sakes becomes altogether more
rational, calculated, utilitarian, hence altogether more frightening: When a diagram of power abandons the model of
sovereignty in favour of a disciplinary model, when it becomes the ‘bio-­power’ or ‘bio-­politics’ of populations, controlling and administering life, it is indeed life that emerges as
the new object of power. At that point law increasingly renounces that symbol of sovereign privilege, the right to put someone to death, but allows itself to produce all the more
hecatombs and genocides: not by returning to the old law of killing, but on the contrary in the name of race, precious space, conditions of life and the survival of a population
that believes itself to be better than its enemy, which it now treats not as the juridical enemy of the old sovereign but as a toxic or infectious agent, a sort of ‘biological danger’.
Auschwitz arguably represents the most grotesque, shameful and hence meaningful example of necessary killing – the violence that is sanctioned in the name of species
necessity (see Agamben, 1995, 2005). Indeed, for Agamben, since one of the most ‘essential characteristics’ of modern biopolitics is to constantly ‘redefine the
threshold in life that distinguishes and separates what is inside from what is outside’, it is within those sites that ‘eliminate radically the people that are excluded’
that the biopolitical racial imperative is exposed in its most brutal form (Agamben, 1995: 171). The camp can therefore be seen to be the defining paradigm of the modern
insomuch as it is a ‘space in which power confronts nothing other than pure biological life without any media-­ tion’ (Agamben, 1995: 179). While lacking Agamben’s intellectual
sophistry, such a Schmittean--inspired approach to violence – that is, sovereignty as the ability to declare a state of juridical exception – has certainly gained wide-- spread
academic currency in recent times. The field of international relations, for instance, has been awash with works that have tried to theorize the ‘exceptional times’ in which we live
(see, in particular, Devetak, 2007; Kaldor, 2007). While some of the tactics deployed in the ‘Global War on Terror’ have undoubtedly lent credibility to these approaches, in
terms of understanding violence they are limited. Violence is only rendered problematic here when it is associated with some act of unmitigated geopolitical excess (e.g. the
invasion of Iraq, Guantánamo Bay, use of torture, and so forth). This is unfortunate. Precluding any critical evaluation of the contemporary forms of violence that take place
there is a categorical failure to address how necessary
within the remit of humanitarian discourses and practices,

violence continues to be an essential feature of the liberal encounter. Hence, with post-
interventionary forms of violence no longer appearing to be any cause for concern, the nature of the racial imperative that underwrites the violence of contemporary liberal
occupations is removed from the analytical arena.
 SEMIOTICS/LANGUAGE DA
Framework transforms language into endless obedience and control – to vote neg
is to sentence to death our only chance of breaking out of the semiotic coordinates
they attempt to impose on the world
Deleuze and Guattari 80. Gilles and Felix, French sorcerers, “A Thousand Plateaus” pg. 75-
77 //LS
When the schoolmistress instructs her students on a rule of grammar or¶ arithmetic, she is not
informing them, any more than she is informing herself¶ when she questions a student. She does not so much
instruct as¶ "insign," give orders or commands. A teacher's commands are not external¶ or
additional to what he or she teaches us. They do not flow from primary¶ significations or result
from information: an order always and already concerns¶ prior orders, which is why ordering is
redundancy. The compulsory¶ education machine does not communicate
information; it imposes upon¶ the child semiotic coordinates possessing all of the dual foundations of¶ 75¶
7¶ 6 □ NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS¶ grammar (masculine-feminine, singular-plural, noun-verb, subject
of the¶ statement-subject of enunciation, etc.). The
elementary unit of language—¶ the statement—is the
order-word.1¶ Rather than common sense, a faculty¶ for the centralization of information, we must define an
abominable¶ faculty consisting in emitting, receiving, and transmitting order-words.¶ Language
is made not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience.¶ "The baroness has
not the slightest intention of convincing me of her¶ sincerity; she is simply indicating that she prefers to see me pretend to¶ agree."2¶
We see this in police or government announcements, which often¶ have little plausibility or truthfulness, but say
very clearly what should be¶ observed and retained. Theindifference to any kind of credibility exhibited¶ by these
announcements often verges on provocation. This is proof¶ that the issue lies elsewhere. Let people say...: that
is all language¶ demands. Spengler notes that the fundamental forms of speech are not the¶
statement of a judgment or the expression of a feeling, but "the command,¶ the expression of
obedience, the assertion, the question, the affirmation or¶ negation," very short phrases
that command life and are inseparable from¶ enterprises and large-scale projects: "Ready?" "Yes." "Go ahead."3¶
Words¶ are not tools, but we give children language, pens, and notebooks as we give¶ workers
shovels and pickaxes. A rule of grammar is a power marker before¶ it is a syntactical
marker. The order does not refer to prior significations or¶ to a prior organization of distinctive units. Quite the opposite.
Information¶ is only the strict minimum necessary for the emission, transmission,¶ and
observation of orders as commands. One must be just informed¶ enough not to confuse "Fire!"
with "Fore!" or to avoid the unfortunate situation¶ of the teacher and the student as described by Lewis Carroll (the¶ teacher, at
the top of the stairs, asks a question that is passed on by servants,¶ who distort it at each step of the way, and the student, below in
the courtyard,¶ returns an answer that is also distorted at each stage of the trip back).¶ Language is not life; it gives
life orders. Life does not speak; it listens and¶ waits.4¶ Every order-word, even a father's to
his son, carries a little death¶ sentence—a Judgment, as Kafka put it.¶ The hard part is to specify the
status and scope of the order-word. It is¶ not a question of the origin of language, since the order-word
is only a¶ language-function, a function coextensive with language. If language¶ always seems to presuppose itself,
if we cannot assign it a nonlinguistic¶ point of departure, it is because language does not operate
between something¶ seen (or felt) and something said, but always goes from saying to saying.¶ We believe
that narrative consists not in communicating what one has¶ seen but in transmitting what one has
heard, what someone else said to¶ you. Hearsay. It does not even suffice to invoke a vision distorted by passion.¶ The "first"
language, or rather the first determination of language, is¶ NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS □
77¶ not the trope or metaphor but indirect discourse. The importance some¶ have accorded metaphor and
metonymy proves disastrous for the study of¶ language. Metaphors and metonymies are merely effects; they are a part of¶ language
only when they presuppose indirect discourse. There are many¶ passions in a passion, all manner of voices in
a voice, murmurings, speaking¶ in tongues: that is why all discourse is indirect, and the translative¶
movement proper to language is that of indirect discourse.5¶ Benveniste¶ denies that the bee has language, even though it has an
organic coding process¶ and even uses tropes. It has no language because it can communicate¶ what it has seen but not transmit
what has been communicated to it. A bee¶ that has seen a food source can communicate the message to bees that did¶ not see it, but
a bee that has not seen it cannot transmit the message to others¶ that did not see it.6¶ Language is not content to go
from a first party to a¶ second party, from one who has seen to one who has not, but necessarily¶ goes
from a second party to a third party, neither of whom has seen. It is in¶ this sense that
language is the transmission of the word as order-word, not¶ the communication of a sign as
information. Language is a map, not a tracing.¶ But how can the order-word be a function
coextensive with language¶ when the order, the command, seems tied to a restricted type of
explicit¶ proposition marked by the imperative?

All of their evidence presupposes a finality to language that is wrong and ignores
the ways in which semiotics are mixed together which shifts the question of the
ballot – you should choose performative affirmation over the dry fascism of the
1NC to enable a new discourse and new way of existence
Deleuze and Guattari 80. Gilles and Felix, French sorcerers, “A Thousand Plateaus” pg. 77-
86 //LS
Austin's famous theses clearly demonstrate that the various extrinsic¶ relations between action and speech by
which a statement can describe an¶ action in an indicative mode or incite it in an imperative
mode, etc., are not¶ all there is. There are also intrinsic relations between speech and certain¶
actions that are accomplished by saying them (the performative: I swear by¶ saying "I
swear"), and more generally between speech and certain actions¶ that are accomplished in
speaking (the illocutionary: I ask a question by¶ saying "Is ... ?" I make a promise by saying "I love you ..."; I give a command¶ by
using the imperative, etc.). These acts internal to speech, these¶ immanent relations between statements
and acts, have been termed¶ implicit or nondiscursive presuppositions, as opposed to the potentially¶
explicit assumptions by which a statement refers to other statements or an¶ external action (Ducrot). The theory of the
performative sphere, and the¶ broader sphere of the illocutionary, has had three important and
immediate¶ consequences: (1) It has made it impossible to conceive of language as a¶
code, since a code is the condition of possibility for all explanation. It has¶ also made it
impossible to conceive of speech as the communication of¶ information: to order, question,
promise, or affirm is not to inform someone¶ about a command, doubt, engagement, or assertion but to
effectuate¶ these specific, immanent, and necessarily implicit acts. (2) It has made it¶
impossible to define semantics, syntactics, or even phonematics as scientific¶ zones of language independent of
pragmatics. Pragmatics ceases to be¶ 7¶ 8 □ NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS¶ a "trash heap,"
pragmatic determinations cease to be subject to the alternative:¶ fall outside language, or answer to
explicit conditions that syntacticize¶ and semanticize pragmatic determinations. Instead, pragmatics becomes¶ the
presupposition behind all of the other dimensions and insinuates itself¶ into everything. (3) It
makes it impossible to maintain the distinction¶ between language and speech
because speech can no longer be defined simply¶ as the extrinsic and individual use of a primary
signification, or the variable¶ application of a preexisting syntax. Quite the opposite, the meaning¶ and
syntax of language can no longer be defined independently of the¶ speech acts they
presuppose.7[…] We constantly pass¶ from order-words to the "silent order" of things, as Foucault
puts it, and¶ vice versa.¶ But when we use a word as vague as "intervene," when we say that¶ expressions
intervene or insert themselves into contents, are we not still¶ prey to a kind of idealism in
which the order-word instantaneously falls¶ from the sky? What we must
determine is not an origin but points of intervention¶ or insertion in the
framework of the reciprocal presupposition of¶ the two forms. Both forms of content
and forms of expression are inseparable¶ from a movement of deterritorialization that carries
them away. Both¶ expression and content are more or less deterritorialized, relatively¶
deterritorialized, according to the particular state of their form. In this¶ respect, one cannot posit a
primacy of expression over content, or content¶ over expression. Sometimes the semiotic
components are more deterritorialized¶ than the material components, and sometimes the
reverse. For¶ example, a mathematical complex of signs may be more deterritorialized¶ than a set of particles; conversely, the
particles may have experimental¶ effects that deterritorialize the semiotic system. A criminal action
may be¶ deterritorializing in relation to the existing regime of signs (the earth cries¶ for revenge and crumbles beneath my feet, my
offense is too great); but the¶ sign that expresses the act of condemnation may in turn be deterritorializing¶ in relation to all actions
and reactions ("a fugitive and a¶ vagabond shalt thou be in the earth" [Gen. 4:12], you cannot even be¶ killed). In short, there
are degrees of deterritorialization that quantify the¶ 0 88 □¶ NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF
LINGUISTICS¶ respective forms and according to which contents and expression are¶ conjugated, feed
into each other, accelerate each other, or on the contrary¶ become stabilized and perform a
reterritorialization. What we call circumstances¶ or variables are these degrees themselves. There
are variables of¶ content, or proportions in the interminglings or aggregations of bodies, and¶
there are variables of expression, factors internal to enunciation. […] We have gone from explicit
commands to order-words as implicit presuppositions;¶ from order-words to the immanent acts or incorporeal transformations¶
they express; and from there to the assemblages of enunciation¶ whose variables they are. ¶ To the extent these variables
enter at a given¶ moment into determinable relations, the assemblages combine in a regime¶ of
signs or a semiotic machine. It is obvious that a society is plied by several¶ 0 84 □¶ NOVEMBER 20, 1923:
POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS¶ semiotics, that its regimes are in fact mixed. Moreover, at a later
time there¶ will arise new order-words that will modify the variables and will not yet be¶ part of a known
regime. Thus the order-word is redundancy in several¶ ways: as a function of the process of transmission essential to it, and in ¶ itself,
from the time it is emitted, in its "immediate" relation with the act or¶ transformation it effectuates. The
order-word is already redundancy even¶ when it is in rupture with a particular semiotic. That is why
every statement¶ of a collective assemblage of enunciation belongs to indirect discourse.¶ Indirect
discourse is the presence of a reported statement within¶ the reporting statement, the presence
of an order-word within the word.¶ Language in its entirety is indirect discourse. Indirect discourse in no way¶ supposes
direct discourse; rather, the latter is extracted from the former, to¶ the extent that the operations of signifiance and
proceedings of¶ subjec-tification in an assemblage are distributed, attributed, and¶ assigned, or that
the variables of the assemblage enter into constant¶ relations, however temporarily. ¶ Direct discourse is a
detached fragment of¶ a mass and is born of the dismemberment of the collective assemblage;¶ but
the collective assemblage is always like the murmur from which I take¶ my proper name, the
constellation of voices, concordant or not, from which¶ I draw my voice. I always depend on a molecular
assemblage of¶ enunciation that is not given in my conscious mind, any more than it¶ depends
solely on my apparent social determinations, which combine¶ many heterogeneous regimes of signs. Speaking
in tongues. To write is¶ perhaps to bring this assemblage of the unconscious to the light of day,
to¶ select the whispering voices, to gather the tribes and secret idioms from¶ which I extract
something I call my Self (Moi). I is an order-word. A¶ schizophrenic said: "I heard voices say: he is
conscious of life."16 In this¶ sense, there is indeed a schizophrenic cogito, but it is a
cogito that makes¶ self-consciousness the incorporeal transformation of an order-
word, or a¶ result of indirect discourse. My direct discourse is still the free indirect¶ discourse running through me,
coming from other worlds or other planets.¶ That is why so many artists and writers have been tempted by the seance¶ table.
When we ask what faculty is specific to the order-word, we must¶ indeed attribute to it some
strange characteristics: a kind of¶ instantaneousness in the emission, perception, and transmission of¶ order-
words; a wide variability, and a power of forgetting permitting one to¶ feel absolved of the
order-words one has followed and then abandoned in¶ order to welcome others; a
properly ideal or ghostly capacity for the apprehension¶ of incorporeal transformations; an aptitude for grasping
language¶ as an immense indirect discourse.'7¶ The faculty of the cuer and the cued, of¶ the song that always
holds a tune within a tune in a relation of redundancy;¶ a faculty that is in truth mediumistic, glossolalic, or
xenoglossic.¶ Let us return to the question of how this defines a language-function, a¶ 0¶ NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF
LINGUISTICS □ 85¶ function coextensive with language. It is evident that order-words, collective¶ assemblages,
or regimes of signs cannot be equated with language. But¶ they effectuate its condition of
possibility {the superlinearity of expression),¶ they fulfill in each instance this condition of possibility; without¶ them, language
would remain a pure virtuality (the superlinear character¶ of indirect discourse).
 AT: SKILLS
Debate doesn’t give you any meaningful skills
Hester 13. Note posted to the CEDA Forums from Mike Hester, an extremely successful and influential policy
debate coach at University of West Georgia. I have had a lot of respect for him through the years. - Alfred Snider,
editor November 22, 2013, 01:27:03 AM.
http://www.cedadebate.org/forum/index.php/topic,5407.msg11974.html#msg11974 //LS
To whom it may concern, CEDA-NDT Debate is a hot mess right now. There are so many things
wrong, it can sometimes seem like they're all related. Maybe they are (reference Homer Simpson's "one big ball of lies"
explanation to Marge), but a delineation may still provide some guidance as to what we can change, what we may have to accept, and
where (if anywhere) we may go from here... the foundation We no longer have one, and haven't for more
than two decades. Fewer and fewer debate coaches are communication scholars, which is fine because
Communication Departments don't consider us anything more than the bastard cousins who
show up at the family reunion piss-drunk and demanding more potato salad. Our activity long
ago (40 years?) lost any resemblance to a public speaking event attracting outside audiences. The
problem is we vacated that academic space without being able to find a home anywhere else. Despite the pious
assumptions of some with "policy" in mind, we are not a legitimate "research" community of
scholars. The "portable skills" we currently engrain in our students via practice are: all
sources are equivalent, no need for qualifications; "quoting" a source simply means underlining
ANY words found ANYWHERE in the document, context and intent are irrelevant; and we are
the only group outside of Faux News that believes one's argument is improved by taking every
point of logic to its most absurd extreme. Simply put, 99.9% of the speech docs produced in debates
would receive no better than a C (more likely F) in any upper division undergraduate research-based class.
Comically, we are the public speaking research activity that is atrocious at oral persuasion and
woefully in violation of any standard research practices. But this letter is not intended to bury Debate, even
though it's hard to praise it in its current state. Before any peace treaty ending the Paradigm Wars can be signed and ratified, an
honest appraisal of where Debate fits in the Academy is necessary.

There’s no meaningful relationship between their education/agency claims and

social change—get out of the argument room
Schlag ‘3 (Pierre, Distinguished Prof. @ U. of Colorado and Byron R. White Professor @
Colorado Law School, 57 U. Miami L. Rev. 1029)
The presumption is that the words of the judge (if they are well crafted) will effectively produce a social
reality that corresponds roughly with the words uttered. But what reason is there to
believe this? False Empowerment (No. 2) The endlessly repeated question in first year, "What should the
court do?" leads law students to believe that courts respond to the force of the better
argument. This would be tolerable if one added two provisos: 1. The better argument often means little more than the one the courts are predisposed to believe; and
2. In the phrase "force of better argument" it's important to attend not just to the "better" part, but to the other term as well. False Empowerment (No. 3) Law students

first learn of many complex social and economic realities through the medium of case law. What they

learn is thus the law's vision of these economic and social realities. Not surprisingly, there is an almost magical
correspondence between legal categories and social or economic practices. This magical fit leads law
students (later to become law professors) to have an extremely confident view of the efficacy of law. Many law students are cured of this belief structure by a stay in the legal
clinic or by law practice. There is one group of people, however, who are generally not cured of this belief-structure at all, but whose faith is actually intensified. These are the
people who hold prestigious judicial clerkships where an emotional proximity to and identification with their judge ("my judge") leads to an even greater confidence in the
efficacy of law. These people are frequently chosen to teach in law schools. False empowerment can be disempowering. It can also lead to pessimism and despair. Many people
react to a loss of faith in law or legal studies with despair or pessimism. But this is the despair and pessimism that comes from giving up a naieve or a romantic vision of law
and/or legal studies. The onslaught of this despair and pessimism is a good thing. It is like the thirty-something who realizes that he is mortal and that life is brief. Generally, this
When the
is not welcome news. At the same time, it may help prevent a life spent in Heideggerian dread, tanning salons, or the interstices of footnote 357.

academic loses faith in law or legal studies, typically that person is most troubled because
she has lost the framework that makes her academic project possible. But so what? Isn't
the demand that law conform to an academic project arguably a selfish one? The Con, The Joke, and The
Ironic Truth The Con: In the courtroom, the appellate judge is typically seated behind an elevated bench. On the classroom blackboard the appellate judge is chalked in above
the plaintiff and the defendant. This is both a reflection and a reinforcement of the belief that the appellate judge is an intellectually and politically privileged legal actor. The
Joke: In actuality, the appellate judge is a person who operates in conditions of severe information deficits and whose outlook is thoroughly manipulated by professional
rhetoricians. Very often he has little or no understanding of the configurations of the social field to which his rulings will apply. What's more, this is a person who is prohibited
from talking about the social field, except with a highly restricted number of people. The Ironic Truth: On the other hand, because we believe the appellate judge is a particularly
intellectuals like to believe that law is an intelligent enterprise. They like to
privileged intellectual and political actor, we contribute to making him so. Legal

believe that the law offers an interesting vocabulary, grammar, and rhetoric through which
to think about the world and law itself. This is naive. The political demand that law be efficacious means that law must track, must
indeed incorporate popular beliefs about social and economic identities, causation, linguistic meaning, and so forth. (Those beliefs are often intellectually bereft.) The Argument
Room The argument room is a place where academic advocates go to argue passionately
about law and politics. (Apologies to Monty Python.) Within the room, arguments are won and lost;
triumphs and defeats are had. But generally, no one outside the room pays much attention to what goes on

inside the room. Sometimes there is seepage and fragments of the conversations are heard outside the room. Participants
most often spend their time arguing about what should happen outside the room. This they call

“knowledge” or "understanding" or "jurisprudence" or “scholarship” or “politics.” The one thing that generally cannot
be talked about inside the room is the construction of the room itself. Politics (No. 1) For
progressive legal thinkers, politics is a "theoretical unmentionable": The concept "politics" does a great deal of theoretical

work and yet its identity remains generally immune from scrutiny. The categories (right, left) and the fundamental grammar of politics (progress, reaction, and so
forth) generally go unquestioned. Oddly, while everything else seems to be contingent, conditional, contextual, and so on, the categories of politics seem to be oddly stable, nearly transcendent. Strangely, this occurs at a time when the categories, left and right (and
even politics itself), seem increasingly fragile and non-referential. Still, this is an intensely political time - political not in the sense of significant social contestation (not much of that) nor in the sense of ideological struggle (not happening much either). Rather,
political in the sense of very significant reorganizations and reallocations of power, wealth, and so on. Capital (for lack of a better term) is in a period of rapid self-reorganization in which it increasingly regiments precincts of life previously offering some resistance to
its grammar - to wit: time, family, media, public space, wilderness, and so forth. The point is not that these precincts were immune to capital before, but rather that capital is advancing at such an intense rate to bring about a significant disruption and a qualitative
change in these precincts. This change is manifest not only in the colonization of new precincts, but in the self-organization of capital [*1034] (new financial vehicles) and, of course, in new literary and intellectual forms (postmodernism as both symptom and
diagnosis). Meanwhile, the old categories, the old grammar, the old answers, seem to have lost some of their hold. The right is intellectually stagnant. And the left is, as a social presence, ontologically challenged. Indeed, in the United States, we seem at present to
have several right wings and no left wing. This does not mean that "politics" as a social category is necessarily dead. It might mean simply that we (and others) have not understood, have not grasped, have not articulated its new configurations. What would be
required on the intellectual level is a re-evaluation not only of the conventionally articulated categories, but of the social and economic ontology. At its best, postmodernism (and there has been a lot of bad reactionary and nostalgic postmodernism) is an attempt to
trigger such a re-evaluation. Progressives, understandably, strive to protect their categories, grammar, and self-image from these challenges. But this is not without cost. To argue in favor of political positions is sometimes political. But it is not always political.

often
Sometimes taking up a political argument is political and sometimes it has no consequences whatsoever. One cannot know beforehand. But it is a serious mistake to suppose that arguing in favor of a political position is in and of itself political. Very

in the legal academy, to argue for a political (or normative) position is not political at all. It simply
triggers a scholastic, highly stereotyped meta-discourse about whether the arguments advanced
are sound, accurate, should be adopted, or the like. Traditionally, the left has defended the victims of capitalism, imperialism, and racism.
Indeed, this is an important part of what it means to be "on the left." Meanwhile, in the university, scholarly attention

depends upon the production of new exciting ideas and research agendas. This poses a problem for
the left: the victims of capitalism, imperialism, and racism remain the same. The political-intellectual defenses advanced on behalf of
victims remain the same. This leads to a certain sense of weariness and deja vu - stereotyped arguments, standard rhetorical moves. A tendency to fight
the same old fights. Machines. This is a problem. A Problem for Progressive Legal Thinkers As the author of Laying Down the Law, it just isn't clear to me that law is the sort of
thing that is endlessly perfectible. At times it seems to me that law is a lot like military strategy. You can try making military strategy the best it can be (maybe you should). But
when you get done it's still going to be military strategy. In that context it would be a good thing to have a few people (I volunteer) to be less than completely enthralled by
it seems odd
military strategy. The same would go for law. It could be that law is objectionable in important respects because, well ... it's law. From this standpoint

that someone should feel authorized to say: "You should do X." Legal Thought as Arrogance The
belief is that the future of the free world, the maintenance of the rule of law, the welfare of the republic, the liberation of oppressed peoples, the
direction of the Court, the legitimacy of the Florida election, hangs on a law professor's next article. This is the esprit serieux gone

nuts. The most significant effect of this belief is to arrest thought and end the play of ideas necessary for creativity.Yes, legal interpretation sometimes takes place in a field of pain and death. But that hardly means that legal studies takes place in a field of
pain and death. It is a residual objectivism that enables legal academics to believe that when they write about law - what it is or what it should be - they are somehow engaged in the same enterprise as judges. They're not. It is not that legal scholarship is without
consequence. It's just that the institutional and rhetorical contexts are sufficiently different that the consequences are different as well. There is an important, indeed foundational, category mistake that sustains American legal thought - it is the supposition that
because academics and judges deploy the same vocabulary and the same grammar, they are involved in largely the same enterprise. I just don't think that's true. My own view is that legal academics are but one social group (among many) competing for the
articulation of what law is. Judges are another. Social movements, corporations, public interest groups, administrative officials, criminals, etc., are some of the others. For most of the history of the American law school, academics have anointed judges as privileged
speakers of law. In turn, legal academics have adopted the habits, forms of thought, and rhetoric of judges - thereby accruing to themselves the authority to say what the law is. Legal academics legitimate their claim to say what the law is by fashioning law as an
academic discipline requiring expertise. Legal academics then hold themselves out as possessing this expertise. Among those critical theorists who seek to contest this expertise, one can distinguish two approaches. One approach is to try to reveal the emptiness of the
claims to expertise among the legal intelligentsia and to reveal how these claims nonetheless gain power. Another approach is to try to relocate the authority to say what the law is among those who have been excluded. I do not see these approaches as antithetical,
but rather as complementary. Furthermore, both approaches will in fact reinscribe, will performatively reinforce, precisely the sort of rhetorics and hierarchies they contest. No way around that. I think critical thinkers all do this - though in different ways. And it's
certainly worthwhile pointing out how it is being done. At the same time, no one is safe or immune from this sort of criticis m. To learn to laugh at what is taken seriously, but is not serious, is a serious thing to do. To take seriously what is not, is a drag. A Problem for
Progressives
 Progressives wish to pursue a politics that is efficacious. This means keeping track both of the social context in which progressivism articulates itself (on the side of the subject), and the social context in [*1038] which progressivism seeks to register its
results (on the side of the object). But this work of reconnaissance - a work that is necessary - may bring unwelcome news: namely that progressivism unmodified is no longer a terribly cogent project. Choices will have to be made: to defend progressive thought
against this unwelcome news or to put the identity of progressive projects at risk by encountering this unwelcome news. Formalism is virtually an inexorable condition of legal scholarship in the following sense: a legal academic generally writes scholarship outside
the social pressures of what a lawyer would call real stakes, real clients, or real consequences. The failure of an argument in the pages of the Stanford Law Review is generally very different from the failure of an argument in a brief or an opinion. The difference in
context changes the character and consequences of the acts - even if the authors use exactly the same words. Binary and Not (Insider/Outsider, Immanent/Transcendent, Mind/Body etc. etc. etc.)It's one thing to deploy oppositional binarism to describe the broad
structures of a text. It's quite another to adopt binarism as an intellectual lifestyle choice. Oppositional binarism has a special hold/appeal in American law precisely because: 1) law is often identified with what appellate courts say it is; and 2) by the time a case gets
to an appellate court, the reductionism of litigation and the binary structure of the adversarial orientation has reduced the dispute to an either/or (e.g., liberty vs. equality or formal equality vs. substantive equality, and so on). But ... Oppositional binarism flounders
because law does not have fixed, uncontroversial grids. Hence, for instance, the notion that a person is an insider or an outsider just doesn't track with much of anything (except perhaps the author's own formalism).If one thinks about it, a person is an insider in this
respect (he's white) but an outsider in that respect (he's working class) and then an insider with respect to his pedigree (he went to Columbia) but really an outsider within his insider Columbia status because he was profoundly [*1039] alienated from the Columbia
social scene and blah blah blah. After a while (very soon, actually) the insider/outsider distinction loses its hold. The point is, unless you happen to have a well-formed, non-overlapping fixed grid (and this would be a very strange thing for a critical theorist to have!),
oppositional binarism (like everything else) ultimately collapses. Interestingly, there was a moment of slippage in the history of critical legal studies (or perhaps the fem-crits) when binary oppositionalism slid from a heuristic into (of all things) a metaphysic! The
Machines In Keith Aoki's comic strip, the agents of R.E.A.S.O.N. and P.I.E.R.R.E. fight each other in a comically cliched fashion. It is Nick Fury jurisprudence. And there is something strikingly right about that (however humbling it may be for me and others). One of

antagonists deploy machines against each other. In legal

the things that happens in the Nick Fury comic strips (as in Keith Aoki's contribution) is that the

legal thought is not really thought at all - but the

thought, we have a lot of machines in operation. n13 By this I mean that a great deal of so-called

deployment of a series of rhetorical operations over and over again to perform actions (usually destructive
in character) on other peoples' texts or persons. Every argument tends to become a machine. Over time, legal academics tend to become their own arguments. Then, of course,
they become their own machines. At that point, it's time to move on.

The political is already ceded

Gilens and Page 14. Martin, Professor of Politics at Princeton University, and Benjamin,
Gordon S. Fulcher Professor of Decision Making at Northwestern University, “Testing Theories
of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens”, American Political Science
Association, Perspectives on Politics, September 2014 | Vol. 12/No. 3, p. 575-577
Each of our four theoretical traditions (Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic-Elite Domination, Majoritarian Interest-Group
Pluralism, and Biased Pluralism) emphasizes different sets of actors as critical in determining U.S. policy outcomes, and each
tradition has engendered a large empirical literature that seems to show a particular set of actors to be highly influential. Yet nearly
all the empirical evidence has been essentially bivariate. Until very recently it has not been possible to test these
theories against each other in a systematic, quantitative fashion. By directly pitting the
predictions of ideal-type theories against each other within a single statistical model (using a unique
data set that includes imperfect but useful measures of the key independent variables for nearly two thousand policy issues), we
have been able to produce some striking findings. One is the nearly total failure of “median
voter” and other Majoritarian Electoral Democracy theories. When the preferences of economic
elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the
average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-
significant impact upon public policy. The failure of theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy is all the
more striking because it goes against the likely effects of the limitations of our data. The preferences of ordinary
citizens were measured more directly than our other independent variables, yet they are
estimated to have the least effect. Nor do organized interest groups substitute for direct citizen
influence, by embodying citizens’ will and ensuring that their wishes prevail in the fashion
postulated by theories of Majoritarian Pluralism. Interest groups do have substantial independent impacts on
policy, and a few groups (particularly labor unions) represent average citizens’ views reasonably well. But
the interest-group system as a whole does not. Overall, net interest-group alignments are
not significantly related to the preferences of average citizens. The net alignments of the most
influential, business-oriented groups are negatively related to the average citizen’s wishes. So
existing interest groups do not serve effectively as transmission belts for the wishes of the
populace as a whole. “Potential groups” do not take up the slack, either, since average citizens’ preferences have
little or no independent impact on policy after existing groups’ stands are controlled for.
Furthermore, the preferences of economic elites (as measured by our proxy, the preferences of “affluent” citizens) have
far more independent impact upon policy change than the preferences of average citizens do . To
be sure, this does not mean that ordinary citizens always lose out; they fairly often get the policies they favor, but only because those
policies happen also to be preferred by the economically-elite citizens who wield the actual influence. Of course our findings
speak most directly to the “first face” of power: the ability of actors to shape policy outcomes on
contested issues. But they also reflect—to some degree, at least—the “second face” of power: the ability
to shape the agenda of issues that policy makers consider. The set of policy alternatives that we analyze is
considerably broader than the set discussed seriously by policy makers or brought to a vote in Congress, and our alternatives are (on
average) more popular among the general public than among interest groups. Thus the fate of these policies can
reflect policy makers’ refusing to consider them rather than considering but rejecting them . (From
our data we cannot distinguish between the two.) Our results speak less clearly to the “third face” of power: the ability of elites to
shape the public’s preferences.49 We know that interest groups and policy makers themselves often devote
considerable effort to shaping opinion. If they are successful, this might help explain the high correlation we find
between elite and mass preferences. But it cannot have greatly inflated our estimate of average citizens’ influence on policy making,
which is near zero. What do our findings say about democracy in America? They certainly constitute
troubling news for advocates of “populistic” democracy, who want governments to respond primarily or
exclusively to the policy preferences of their citizens. In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority
does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens
disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover,
because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large
majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it. A possible objection to populistic
democracy is that average citizens are inattentive to politics and ignorant about public policy; why should we worry if their poorly
informed preferences do not influence policy making? Perhaps economic elites and interest-group leaders enjoy greater policy
expertise than the average citizen does. Perhaps they know better which policies will benefit everyone, and perhaps they seek the
common good, rather than selfish ends, when deciding which policies to support. But we tend to doubt it. We believe instead that—
collectively—ordinary citizens generally know their own values and interests pretty well, and that their
expressed policy preferences are worthy of respect.50 Moreover, we are not so sure about the informational advantages of elites. Yes,
detailed policy knowledge tends to rise with income and status. Surely wealthy Americans and corporate executives tend to know a
lot about tax and regulatory policies that directly affect them. But how much do they know about the human impact of Social
Security, Medicare, food stamps, or unemployment insurance, none of which is likely to be crucial to their own well-being? Most
important, we see no reason to think that informational expertise is always accompanied by an
inclination to transcend one’s own interests or a determination to work for the common good. All
in all, we believe that the public is likely to be a more certain guardian of its own interests than any feasible alternative. Leaving
aside the difficult issue of divergent interests and motives, we would urge that the superior wisdom of economic elites or organized
interest groups should not simply be assumed. It should be put to empirical test. New empirical research will be needed to pin down
precisely who knows how much, and what, about which public policies. Our findings also point toward the need to learn more about
exactly which economic elites (the “merely affluent”? the top 1 percent? the top one-tenth of 1 percent?) have how much impact upon
public policy, and to what ends they wield their influence. Similar questions arise about the precise extent of influence of particular
sets of organized interest groups. And we need to know more about the policy preferences and the political influence of various
actors not considered here, including political party activists, government officials, and other noneconomic elites. We hope that our
work will encourage further exploration of these issues. Despite the seemingly strong empirical support in
previous studies for theories of majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest that majorities of
the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts.
Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association,
and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful
business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to
being a democratic society are seriously threatened. Clearly, when one holds constant net interest-group
alignments and the preferences of affluent Americans, it makes very little difference what the general public
thinks. The probability of policy change is nearly the same (around 0.3) whether a tiny minority
or a large majority of average citizens favor a proposed policy change (refer to the top panel of figure 1).
 MISC
Political ambiguity makes their limits impossible – reject any limits impacts
Christian De Cock, 2001, Professor of Organizational behaviour, change management, creative problem solving, “Of Philip
K. Dick, reflexivity and shifting realities Organizing (writing) in our post-industrial society”, Science Fiction and Organization
'As Marx might have said more generally, 'all that is built or all that is "natural" melts into image' in the contemporary global
economies of signs and space' (Lash and Urry, 1994, p. 326). The opinion seems to be broadly shared among
both academics and practitioners that traditional conceptions of effective organizing and
decision-making are no longer viable because we live in a time of irredeemable turbulence and
ambiguity (Gergen, 1995). The emerging digital or 'new' economy seems to be a technologically driven vision of new forms of
organizing, relying heavily on notions of flexibility as a response this turbulence. Corporate dinosaurs must be replaced with smart
networks that add value. Words such as 'cyberspace' 3 and 'cyborganization' drip easily from tongues (e.g. Parker and Cooper, 1998)
and 'the organization' becomes more difficult to conceptualize as it 'dissipates into cyberspace'
and 'permeates its own boundaries' (Hardy and Clegg 1997: S6). Organizations are losing important elements of
permanence as two central features of the modern organization, namely the assumption of self-contained units and its structural
solidity, are undermined (March, 1995). Even the concept of place becomes increasingly phantasmagoric as locales get thoroughly
penetrated by social influences quite distant from them (Giddens, 1990). In this new organizational world 'reality'
seems to have become only a contract, the fabrication of a consensus that can be modified or can
break down at any time (Kallinikos, 1997) and the witnessing point - the natural datum or physical reference point - seems
to be in danger of being scrapped (Brown, 1997). This notion that reality is dissolving from the inside cannot but
be related with feelings of disorientation and anxiety. Casey (1995, pp. 70-1), for example, provides a vivid
description of the position of 'the self' within these new organizational realities. This is a world where everyone has
lost a sense of everyday competence and is dependent upon experts, where people become
dependent on corporate bureaucracy and mass culture to know what to do. The solidity (or absence of it)
of reality has of course been debated at great length in the fields of philosophy and social theory, but it remains an interesting fact
that organizational scholars have become preoccupied with this issue in recent years. Hassard and Holliday (1998), for
example, talk about the theoretical imperative to explore the linkages between fact/fiction and
illusion/reality. It is as if some fundamental metaphysical questions have finally descended into the metaphorical
organizational street. Over the past decade or so, many academics who label themselves critical management theorists
and/or postmodernists (for once, let's not name any names) have taken issue with traditional modes of
organizing (and ways of theorizing about this organizing) by highlighting many irrationalities and hidden
power issues. These academics have taken on board the idea that language has a role in the constitution of reality and their
work is marked by a questioning of the nature of reality, of our conception of knowledge,
cognition, perception and observation (e.g. Chia, 1996a; Cooper and Law, 1995; Czarniawska, 1997). Notwithstanding
the importance of their contributions, these authors face the problem that in order to condemn a mode of organizing or theorizing
they need to occupy an elevated position, a sort of God's eye view of the world; a position which they persuasively challenge when
they deconstruct the claims of orthodox/modern organizational analyses (Parker, 2000; Weiskopf and Willmott, 1997). Chia, for
example, writes about the radically untidy, ill-adjusted character of the fields of actual experience -
'It is only by … giving ourselves over to the powers of "chaos", ambiguity, and confusion that
new and deeper insights and understanding can be attained' (Chia, 1996b, p. 423) - using arguments
which could not be more tidy, analytical and precise. This of course raises the issue of reflexivity:
if reality can never be stabilized and the research/theorizing process 'is always necessarily
precarious, incomplete and fragmented' (Chia, 1996a, p. 54), then Chia's writing clearly sits rather uncomfortably
with his ontological and epistemological beliefs. In this he is, of course, not alone (see, e.g., Gephart et al.., 1996; Cooper and Law,
1995). This schizophrenia is evidence of rather peculiar discursive rules where certain ontological
and epistemological statements are allowed and even encouraged, but the reciprocate
communicational practices are disallowed. Even the people who are most adventurous in their
ideas or statements (such as Chia) are still caught within rather confined communicational
practices. To use Vickers' (1995) terminology: there is a disjunction between the ways in which organization theorists are ready
to see and value the organizational world (their appreciative setting) and the ways in which they are ready to respond to it (their
instrumental system). When we write about reflexivity, paradox and postmodernism in organizational analysis, it is expected that we
do this unambiguously. 4 And yet, the notion that 'if not consistency, then chaos' is not admitted even by
all logicians, and is rejected by many at the frontiers of natural science research - 'a
contradiction causes only some hell to break loose' (McCloskey, 1994, p. 166). contradiction causes only
some hell to break loose' (McCloskey, 1994, p. 166).

All politics and all survival depends on the ability to be recognized as human
Butler 2004 (Judith, prof of rhet & women’s studies @ Berkeley, Undoing Gender, p. 2)
//broccoli rob
The Hegelian tradition links desire with recognition, claiming that desire is always a desire for recognition and that it is only through
the experience of recognition that any of us becomes constituted as socially viable beings. That view has its allure and its truth, but it
also misses a couple of important points. The terms by which we are recognized as human are socially
articulated and changeable. And sometimes the very terms that confer "humanness" on some
individuals are those that deprive certain other individuals of the possibility of achieving that
status, producing a differential between the human and the less-than-human. These norms have far-reaching
consequences for how we understand the model of the human entitled to rights or included in
the participatory sphere of political deliberation. The human is understood differentially
depending on its race, the legibility of that race, its morphology, the recognizability of that
morphology, its sex, the perceptual verifiability of that sex, its ethnicity, the categorical
understanding of that ethnicity. Certain humans are recognized as less than human, and that
form of qualified recognition does not lead to a viable life. Certain humans are not recognized as human at all,
and that leads to yet another order of unlivable life. If part of what desire wants is to gain recognition. Then gender, insofar as it is
animated by desire, will want recognition as well. But if the schemes of recognition that are available to us are
those that "undo" the person by conferring recognition, or "undo" the person by withholding
recognition, then recognition becomes a site of power by which the human is differentially
produced. This means that to the extent that desire is implicated in social norms, it is bound up with the question of power and
with the problem of who qualifies as the recognizably human and who does not.