Mark Fisher, Cybertime

BREATHING LANGUAGE LIMIT AND EXCESS or RE-SINGULARIZING THE EVENT: a live anxious poetic transcription of Biffo's talk

I write as I listen to
THE EVENT
waves of BLACK SEMIOTICS
SEMIOTICS OF POLUTION
DE-referentialising
DE-territorializing

What has happened to poetic language in the course of a century of abstraction? What is happening to the social body, what is happening to the erotic body in the digital age? Finance as a language. The limits of language and the limits of the world. Poetry as excess. Poetry is the coming back of the body in the space of financial abstraction.

The Italian philosopher Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi was born 65 years ago in Bologna. He was the founder of the magazine a/traverso and an animator of the Italian movement of Autonomia. He has published “The Soul at Work”, “The Uprising” and “Heroes”. His next book “and – Phenomenology of the End” will be published by semiotext(e) at the end of the year.

• Artists: 
  • Berardi 'Bifo' Franco
• Cast: 
  • Berardi 'Bifo' Franco
• Camera: 
  • Janek Rous
• Sound: 
  • Janek Rous
• Editing: 
  • Janek Rous

• Published: 2.10.2015
• Duration: 01:27:46
• Language: EN

Share
Embed

© artycok.tv — Contemporary art online

RE SINGULARIZING / RE-BREATHING / RESPIRATING

(live transcription of a segment of "Language, Limit and Excess" - a talk by Franco Bifo Berardi in Prague (OCT 2015)

What can you do if you want to fight against the power of abstraction? FINANCIAL CAPITALISM
PAUSE
SPACE 

You have to reactivate the erotic body.

The problem of breathing comes back in the history of the movement and the history of language.

Poetry is the move.

Poetry is the movement.

Q & A (BIFO)

The only people who can do something about THAT… ARE THE PEOPLE WHO ARE DAILY PRODUCING THE ALGORITHMS.

The cognitive workers (THE general intellect). THE GENERAL INTELLECT HAS NOT BODY… IT IS COMPOSED BY PEOPLE FRIGHTENED, ALONE, ALIENATED, SUFFERING, TAKING A DEADLY COMPETITION, UNABLE TO BE EROTICALLY INVOLVED  IN RELATION TO THE OTHER. 

THE MYSTIC BODY >> I don’t despise the mystic body. I prefer the erotic body… which is not about sex.
Means "happy to be here."

We precarious workers are not happy to be here.

Reality is female, chaotic and feminine

When the chaos become so overwhelming that the human ability to control reality, reality becomes impotent.

We are facing an impotence. A problem of masculine impotence.

We are producing a masculine depression. Governance is the introduction of tecno-linguistic control the inside the living body of society. This is the limiter.

Now we know that the act of evoking the ROSE by means of combination of pixels is our daily practice.  

What is financial capitalism, if not the systematic application of this kind of de-referentalization of money, for instance. Money is less and less THE REFERENCIAL MEASUREMENT OF SOMETHING THAT EXISTED IN NATURE  

The monetary foundation of new liberal revolution is all about the the ability TO PRODUCE the world…to move. 

MONEY LIKE LANGUAGE IS nothing and it moves EVERYTHING.
THAT’S THE POINT: IT IS NOTHING but it is moving everything.

I KNOW THAT FINANCIAL PEOPLE ARE NOT READING RIMBAUD except Thomas Eliot.  

No poet is involved in financial BUSINESS... BUT YOU KNOW... The interaction between the history of language and poetry and the history of economy is connected on this point.

You the artist have opened this door!

Poets do not care. But the poets have responsibility now in a sense. 

Our pleasure now is to play the other game. The play of the coming back of the body of the general intellect

IN ECONOMY... the coming back of use-value

The game of re-erotization of the body in the process of signification.The problem is that we now we are able to… I don’t know if we are able. We need to be able to reactivate the relation of the erotic bodies of the cognitive workers, at the same time we need to reactivate the relation between our body and the body of planet.

We don't need to produce nothing more.

THE COMING BACK OF THE BODY will be the action of the FACIST or the action of the POETS.

singularity vs Singularity

The concept of EVENT is important in a philosophical level.

It is the emergence of a composition of reality which cannot be reduced to an algorithm
THE EVENT - a singular combination of ontological possibilities.
A non-reducible emergence.
The emergence of something that we cannot compare with nothing that existed before
A singular combination of possibilities.

watch video available here: http://artycok.tv/lang/en-us/28597/language-limit-excess

Cyberspace & Cybertime

"Cyberspace grows in an unlimited fashion, yet mental time is not infinite. The subjective nucleus of cybertime follows the slow rhythm of organic matter. We can increase the time of exposure of the organism to information but the experience  cannot be intensified beyond certain limits.

Beyond these limits, the acceleration of this experience provokes a reduced consciousness of stimulus, a loss of intensity which concerns the aesthetic sphere, that of sensibility, and importantly also the sphere of ethics. The experience of the other is rendered banal, the other becomes part of the uninterrupted and frenetic stimulus, and loses its singularity and intensity - it loses its beauty.

Thus we have less curiosity, less surprise; more stress, aggressiveness, anxiety and fear. The acceleration produces and impoverishment of experience, because we are  exposed to a growing mass of stimuli that we cannot elaborate upon, according to the intensive modalities of pleasure and knowledge.

Again we have more information, less meaning; more information less pleasure. Sensibility is within time. Sensuality is in slowness, and the space of information is too vast and fast to elaborate upon it intensively, deeply. At the point of intersection between electronic cyberspace and organic cybertime is found the fundamental crux of  the present mutation. The great majority of humanity is subjected to the invasion of the video-electronic-flux, and suffers the superimposition of digital code over the codes of recognition and of identification of reality that permeated organic cultures.

The psychopathic epidemic that appears to be spreading in social behaviours also depends on this gap, on the asymmetry between the formal emission ( the techno-communicative system ) and the format of reception ( the social mind). The acceleration produced by the network technologies and the condition of precariousness  and dependence of cognitive labor, forced as it is to be subject to the pace of the productive network, has produced a saturation of human attention which has reached pathological levels.

In the labor process we no longer have availability of time, attention is supersaturated. First of all we have no time for attention within work, and secondly we have no time for affect, for that kind of spatial attention that is eroticism, the attention to our body and to that of others. Sensibility tends to become obtuse. but what happens when we no longer have time for attention.

What happens is that we preconceive things badly; we're no longer able to make decisions.... Society risks being propelled into a condition of panic, of defuse psychopathology, of desensitisation and disaffection. Annoyance in the face of the other and the aggressive reaction are the roots of the new climate of war into which the West has fallen.

To understand the origin of this psychopathology we must first look at the relationship between cyberspace and cybertime. Cyberspace is th infinite productivity of the General Intelligence, of the General Intellect of the Net. When an immense number of points enter into a a non-centric and non-hierarchical connection we have the infinite production of signs, i.e intelectual commodities.

Yet cybertime is by no means infinite. Cybertime is the organic, physical, finite capacity to elaborate information ..."

Franco Bifo Berardi on Cyberspace & Cybertime - extract taken from Precarious Rhapsody - Semiocapitalism & The Pathologies of The Post Alpha Generation - (Minor Compositions, 2009)