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Reading Notes for Bifo's The Uprising

By Brett Zehner

Categories : Literature

Date : 14-07-2014

The theory and activism of 1968 has had such an impact on the thinking of avant garde artists and
writers it has become a cliche, even a failure of the imagination to think outside of the box of 1968. As if
revolutionary tactics stopped just short of the 1970's, Conceptual Art and that Prefontaine runnerchic I
love so much.

There have been many dogma humpers looking for the final critique. However, for those of us looking for
explication on the paradox of individuality and dividuality. For those of us garage conceptualists, ironic
romantics, messy in our semiotic readings and looking for something outside of linguistic traps, another
fitful starting point may be the Autonomists.

Enter Franco "Bifo" Berardi.... An Italian Autonomist theorist in the Marxist tradition whose work mainly
focuses on the role of the media and information technology within post-industrial capitalism. Bifo was a
central figure in the Italian Autonomia movement throughout the 1970's which was, to some
commentators including myself, more long lived and more influential on current anti-political movements
than the movements of 1968. He has written over two dozen published books, as well as a more
extensive number of essays and speeches detailing original concepts such as semio-capitalism and the
precariat.

His latest book The Uprising is "a manifesto for today's precarious times, a rallying cry in the face of the
catastrophic and irreversible crisis that neoliberalism and the financial sphere have established over the
globe." He outlines the embedded dogma of financial capitalism through all sectors of society while
lamenting the failure of "old modes of resistance". Debt and growth are central to the current crises yet
both are linguistic constructs, speech acts repeated to repair and reproduce free floating abstract market
demands. As Berardi maps the current crises what becomes clear is that it is a crises of the social
imagination demanding a new language by which to address these concerns.

The book is remarkable in the way it pits poetry as a revolutionary weapon against financial capitalism.
This is perhaps not such a new concept. Yet the depth to which he explores poetry as the unexpected
insolvency where desire cannot be easily reduced or exchanged as currency is remarkable. Poetics here
becomes a relation between bodies of all kinds, a geography, a diagram to be remade constantly, a
mode of communication, dissensus, infection. Here there is such hope with the cruelty of
experimentation....And on my part such anxious second guessing! What if avant garde poetics
movements just pave new ways of appropriation, capture, and a kinder softer form of social control? Or
even worse, such as the case of the Italian Futurists.

In preperation for Franco "Bifo" Berardi's visit to UCSD in the fall I have compiled my notes, writings-
through, and comments on his book The Uprising. The style and formatting of my notes are a bit
idiosyncratic and attempt to follow my handwritten marginalia.

THEMES:
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1. semiocapitalism- financial capitalism as linguistics

2. form of semiocapitalism: connection vs conjunction/ dissensus vs consensus/conjunction as

heterogeneity- dissensus/ connection as digital equivelance- desolidarity- the other- ethical disorders-
sensibility is the ability to harmonize with the rhizome/ what about a dark futurism? not everything is
connected.

3. how how does bifo situate poetry?/ what poetry does he cite? poetry as diagnosis of a pathology? a
material through which to critique capitalism?/ what tactics does poetics offer? intimate conceptualism?

4. temporality of bifo/ after the future/ utopia time static slowing down and rhythm/ debt and futures/ not
revolution/ insurrection/ exhaustion only escape

5. the social body- therapy/ slow speeds/ financial capitalism and the body./ becoming/ resingularization /
affective attunement/ thinkerships/ what kind of a social body?/ the age of sad desires/ anti depressents
merely remove the inability to work/ aesthetics as the social body- a skin/ excess of language/ surplus of
language?/ essay-the refrain/ the repeatable/ benjamin- the only outcome to political aesthetics is war/
the boroque

6. the cult of energy/ youth/ the threat to collective imagination/ pan panic and nature/ the crisis of
reproduction

7. the cartesian abstraction of lacanian conceptualism/ the speed of abstraction

1. Introduction:
economic dogma- 7
destroyed political reason

IRREVERSIBILITY

Autonomy and escape

mazzarati
virno
lazzarato
autonomia

language- economy
subsumption and subjugation of biopolitical sphere of affection and language to financial capital

SWARM

14
when the social body is wired by techno linguistic automatisms it acts as a swarm: a collective organism
whose behavior is automatically directed by connective interfaces

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AUTOMATION OF LANGUAGE

19
financial parthenogenesis sucks down and dries up every social and linguistic potency
dissolving the products of human activity- especially collective semiotic activity

the word is no longer a factor in the CONJUNCTION of talking affective bodies but a
CONNECTOR once deprived of its conjunctive ability the word becomes a recombinant function,
a discreet versus continuous and formalized versus instinctual operator
*burroughs word virus?

20
connected generation suffers schizopathogenic affects of the automation of word
things but not enough forms- flaubert

21
voice- deictic function- self indication

infinite game of interpretation: desire

language as excess movement- slippage- *derive?

2. EUROPEAN COLLAPSE
THE FINANCIAL BLACK HOLE AND THE VANISHING WORLD

23
process of progressive abstraction

capitalism is the application of human skills as a means to obtain a more abstract goal: the accumulation
of value

24
financial capital- accumulation no longer passes through the production of goods but goes straight to its
monetary goal, extracting value from the pure circulation of money from the virtualization of life and
intelligence

"the concrete wealth of europeans is vanishing into a black hole of purse financial destruction. nothing is
created from this destruction, while the financial class is expropriating the outcome of the general labor
force and of the general intellect"

25
beaudrillard- debt circulates on its own orbit- trajectory of capital free of any economic contingency and
moves about in a parallel universe (the acceleration of capital has exonerated money of its involvements
with the everyday universe of production, value and utility. not even an orbital universe: its is rather ex
orbital, ex centered ex centric with only a very faint probability that one day it might rejoin ours

final predatory abstraction: life turned into time for repaying a metaphysical debt. life intelligence joy
breathing- humanity is going to be sacrificed in order to pay the metaphysical debt
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"the financialization of the economy- a process of the subsumption of the processes of communication
and production by the linguistic machine. the economy has ben invaded by immaterial semiotic flows and
transformed into a process of linguistic exchanges.

language has been captured by the digital financial machine and transformed into a recombination of
connective operational segments."

deregulation of relation between time and value

MATHEMATICAL FEROCITY AND SYMBOLIC INSOLVENCY

symbolist poetry- no pre existent reality

30
"the dereferentialization of language- emancipation of the linguistic sign from the referent- operation of
symbolism- transformation in economy and monetary exchange that occurred in the last part of the
century"

"debt becomes inevitable"

*de regulation of arts= de regulation?

*fallout for environmentalism?= [relation to reality]
LR- WORD HOARD- TICKER- field of events

"production in fact submits to regulation by MATHMATICIZATION OF LANGUAGE/ social life to

markets"

31
"debt is a linguistic pact"

34
cold form of totalitarianism (mathematical slavery)
hot form of fascist reaction
violent reterritorialization of reactive body of european society- nation race ethnic cleansing religious
fundamentalism

imposing mathematical causality on the uncertainty of the bodily and social processes of becoming-other
is the most dangerous of mistakes

new form of fascism

35
disentanglement of social life from the ferocious domination of mathematical exactitude is a poetic task,
poetry is the language of excess an insolvent enunciation in the face of the symbolic debt

THE DYSTOPIC PROPHECY OF POETRY

35
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"symbolism to futurism- beat generation and fluxus- poets have anticipated and predicted the trajectory
of the global economy and of the ordinary business of life"

36
"devastating spiral of abstraction and nihilism
abstraction of work from activity
abstraction of goods from usefulness
abstraction of time from sensuousness
abstraction detached the epidermis of language from the flesh of the linguistic body"

reactivate the social body

37
precarious generation- accept exploitation and low wages depleted of necessary resources for their
education promised a future of the endless repetition of a meaningless act of sacrifice on the altar of
debt

first connected generation. internet natives.

portraits of the precariat

POWER OF THE IMAGINATION AND THE EUROPEAN COLLAPSE

37
europe has to be created
PEACH DISTRICT AND CREATING A PEOPLE TO COME CREATE A TERRITORY TO COME

30
not having a future/ as a refrain

31
d/g foucualt derrida lyotard- imagine a possible future/ a cartography of neoliberal coming future

41
luhmann/ governance is the automation of thought of social existence information without meaning
dominance of the unavoidable
NO FUTURE/ here and now

42
thought has been transformed into journalism

43
25 percent of germans want to be artists/ out of precariousness and sadness can come something
different

i don't want to expect anything from the future so i start my future as an artist

PURGATORY

44
public fictions:
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lowering taxes on the rich you will increase employment

postponing the retirement age increases youth employment
privatization and market competition are the best guarantees of quality for schools and public services
workers are paid too much we have been living above and beyond our means we must be paid less in
order to become more competitive

46
debt has been favored in any and all forms in order to entice people to purchase otherwise unsellable
merchandice and goods
entire societal systems vulnerable and fragile exposing it to repeated collapse as witnessed in the
frequent economic bubble boom and crash cycles

49
there will be little cheer in the coming insurrection/ racism and self defeating violence
DESOLIDARIZATION

task will be to create autonomous structures for knowledge existence survival psychotherapy and giving
life meaning and autonomy. this will be a long and potentially traumatic process

post territorial politics

51
the new financial class has a virtual existence: fragmented dispersed impersonal?????
digital financial hyperabstraction is liquidating the living body of the planet and the social body of the
workers community
ANTI TECH?

53
"burning a bank is totally useless as financial power is not in the physical buildings but in the abstract
connections between numbers algorithms and information. therefore if we want to discover forms of
action which may be able to confront the present form of power we have to start from the understanding
that cognitive labor is the main productive force creating the techno-linguistic automatisms which enable
financial speculation"

54
"autonomy is based on the ability to share daily life and to recognize what what is good for me is good
for you bad bad. solidarity is difficult to build now that labor has been turned into a sprawl of recombinant
time cells and processes of subjectivication has consequently become fragmentary and frail

the pleasure of sharing the breath and space of another"

THE RIGHT TO INSOLVENCY

58
the capitalist form is not only a set of economic rules and functions it is also the internalization of a
certain set of limitations of psychic automatism of rules for compliance

all of a sudden we stop organizing daily life in terms of money and debt. nothing would change in the
concrete
we should imagine and consequently organic the disentanglement of the living potentiality of the general
intellect from the capitalist gestalt- intended first and foremost as a psychic automatism of governing
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daily life (fascist in our heads)

insolvency means disclaiming the economic code of capitalism as a transliteration of real life as a
semioticization of social potency and richness
the concrete useful productive ability of the social body is forced to accept impoverishment in exchange
for nothing. the concrete force of productive labor is submitted tot he unproductive and actually
destructive task of refinancing the failed financial system.

nothing would change in the social machinery nothing in our intellectual ability to conceive and perform
communism is here in our being in the immanent life of common knowledge

we must start from this paradox in order to build a postpolitical and postrevolutionary process of
disentangling the possible from the existent

MORE POISON AS AN ANTIDOTE

AESTHETICS OF EUROPE

66
the myth of energy
organic limits have been denied forgotten organic body of the earth
exhaustion

67
fascism and italian futurism/ cult of the youth and energy/ youth of nations
advertising
avant garde

68
insurrection of exhaustion and slowness

70
bateson- double binds- don't fear decline

3. LANGUAGE ECONOMY AND THE BODY

THE FUTURE AFTER THE END OF THE ECONOMY

ECONOMIC SCIENCE IS NOT A SCIENCE

72
not an observation of reality but reality harmonizing with pretended laws

JUST LIKE POETRY

73
protocols and tools intended to force social reality
economic reality doesn't exist it is the result of a process of technical modeling submission and
exploitation
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FINANCIAL DETERRITORIALIZATION AND LABOR PRECARITY

74
class of the borg- bourgeoisie- star trek

75
precariat- fracture of worker and territory

IMMATERIAL LABOR

THE END OF GROWTH

76
future as infinite expansion

77
affect vs immaterial labor?

RECESSION AND FINANCIAL, IMPERSONAL DICTATORSHIP

78
financial semioticization of the economy is a war machine that destroys social resources and intellectual
skills daily

79
"identifying financial capitalists as persons- difficult
financialization- an effect of language"
stats fears indexes and fears
performing indexical acts of speech that produce immediate effects in the very instant of their
enunciation
automatic social concatenations that you cannot dismantle or avoid'

NO ENEMY TO FIGHT/ CORPORATIONS ARE NOT PEOPLE/ WHAT OF COLLECTIVE

SUBJECTIVITY? HOW DOES THE BODY PLAY INTO COLLECTIVE ART GROUPS?

81
exhaustion as tactic

general intellect is based on cooperation and sharing

CONSENSUS
energy is fading
EXTRACTION INDUSTRIES

the future is over we are living in a space beyond the future

SCIFI VISIONARY PRESENT
SPACE-TIME OF MY WRITING
renounce accumulation and growth

TIME MONEY AND LANGUAGE

83
time language money

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storage of time
the bank stores your time

BOOK AS BANK OF TIME

DIFFERENT RHYTHMS
STORAGE. COULD GIVE YOU TIME
DEBT AND FUTURE TIME

an enigma and a scream- can't find the key the key is nowhere
the scream is for a people to come

FLOATING VALUES

85
essential tool of financial capitalism-
truth disappeared and dissolved
only exchange of signs

86
falling into indeterminancy
FREE LOVE AND NEOLIBERALISM
value time broken with immaterial labor
break from the gold standard
dollar has been liberated and autonomous
ALEATORY- CONCEPTUALISM?
VIOLENCE IN THE PLACE OF MEASUREMENT
VIOLENCE INSTEAD OF A STANDARD
GIVE ME TIME

FASCISM FEMININITY AND FUTURISM

90
bergson- time into duration
symbolist poetics
time is subjective not universal category of the human mind

russian futurists- time from point of view of their literary and artistic production

91
masculine potency acceleration of perception- time politics power
defeminization of cultural self perception
forgetting laziness slowness sensitivity
women disappear and warriors appear

93
"italian futurism is a good essential introduction to the twentieth century, because the 20th century can
be defined as the century that trusted in the future. futurism asserted the idea that the future was the
better dimension of time, not the past. when in fact futurism is all about the destruction of the past, and
the emphasis on and glorification of the future"

1977

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SAFETY FOR ALL BODIES AGAINST THE HORRIBLE CRUSHING MACHINE DESTROYING DAILY
LIFE

95
competition- violence and war
technology whose aim is the transformation of time into labor and labor time into value and the
transformation of our relation with nature into one of scarcity and need and consumption

"fascism- d/g
when a war machine is hidden in every niche when in every nook and in every cranny of daily life a war
machine is hidden
neoliberalism is the most perfect form of fascism"

SEMIO-INFLATION

96
"hyperacceleration/ inflation of semiotics in a different dimension"
speeding up infosphere
cognition and the brain
2000 an overproduction in the field of attention
AN EMOTIONAL COLLAPSE
drugs and the productive worker
A FALSE ESCAPE?

COLLAPSE

100
amphetamine to a depressed person- after 9/11
overproduction is the answer
start a war that never ends

101
technolinguistic machine penetrated the daily and the brain
learned more words from a machine than from our mothers
language and the body
my mother told me and i trust her body
????

102
precariousness starts as a distancing/disconnection of language and the body

4. THE GENERAL INTELLECT IS LOOKING FOR A BODY

ABSTRACTION AND PATHOLOGY

THREE LEVELS OF ABSTRACTION:

103

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abstraction is the main trend of capitalism

the abstraction of value from usefulness (use value)
and the abstraction of productive work from concrete forms of human activity

1. how much value can i produce in a given unit of time/ capitalist abstraction
2. digital abstraction/ no longer field of bodies/ inter-operativity between informational machines
3. financial abstraction- valorization no longer through use value or goods
referrent cancelled. mere circulation of money. debt.
destruction of the real

105
more information means less meaning
the acceleration of financial circulation and valorization implies an elimination of the real world
SUFFERBEAST

pathogenesis
sex- conceptual art- finance capital
value derived not from a physical relationship between work and things but from the self-
replication of the pathogenetic force of finance

this induces mutations

mental disorder with virtual derealization and acceleration

107
mothers in nairobi leave their children to new york to look after children of cognitive workers who leave
their children at home to go to offices

108
a new generation of affective disorder

108
the future is no longer conceived of as a promise, but a threat

DESIRE AND MONEY

109
money is about buying. desire is about creating
desire is not a lack but as a creative activity

"when money takes the lead in the psychic investment of society (neoliberal) desire takes a paradoxical
turn and starts to produce need scarcity and misery/ constant deterritorialization of desire
dragged into a relation of dependence with financial machine
i feel the depression

cognitariat is deterritorialized

111
bourgesois subjectivity seperation of desire and work/ repression of sexual drive and postponement of
pleasure

in financial capital the social unconscious explodes it is everywhere

SUFFERBEAST IS THE SOCIAL BODY/ EXPLOITED THE SUFFERING OF THE CROWD

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IMPOSSIBILITY OF FRIENDSHIP

116
contact only intellectual

123
connective of the network/ anthropological shift

125
"connection vs conjunction!!!"
connection- punctual repeatable interaction of algorithmic functions/straight lines/overlapping perfectly
plug in or out according to discrete modes of interaction that render compatible to preestablished
standard
conjunction- without precision, repetition, perfection
CONNECTION MAKES US SUPPRESS SENSIBILITY.

THE BAROQUE

FOLDING

129-32
rhythm and sonic
refrains
hitler
SONIC WARFARE
INCANTATORY REFRAINS AND THE NATION
SOCIAL REFRAINS- REPEATABLE- BELONGING
RHYTHM AND CHAOS
REFRAIN BETWEEN ENVIRONMENT AND SINGULARITY
MANTRA

5. POETRY AND FINANCE

134
SPEECH ACTS

137
VALORIZATION AND NO NEED FOR THE REAL

138
PRAGMATICS UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA

139
KNOWELDGE'S AUTONOMY?
EVENT

140
REACTIVATING SENSIBILITY
RESINGULARIZATION
LIBERATION

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145
AESTHETICS AND THE REFRAIN
A CONTACT ZONE
FUTURIST RHYTHM
THE EYE VS THE VOICE

150
SCHIZOART

152
THE LIMITS OF THE WORLD
SENSIBLE AND TRANSSENSIBLE

154
RANCIERE
DESIRE AND BECOMING- INFINITE

155
NIGHTMARE-
WHEN ANARCHISTS WIN
ETHICS OF SINGULARITY
DYSTOPIA UTOPIA PARADOX

156
SUBJECT IS LIMIT OF THE WORLD?
PROBLEMS

157
AUTOPOETICS
FINANCIAL CAPITAL AS CLOSED SYSTEM

IRONY VS CYNICISM

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