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REVIEW ESSAY

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Toni Pape
Writing Resistance: Sleeplessness, Poetry
and the Right to the City under Financial
Capitalism
A review of
Berardi, Franco Bifo. 2012. Te Uprising: On Poetry and Finance. Los Angeles/
Cambridge: Semiotext(e)/MIT Press.
Crary, Jonathan. 2013. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. London/New
York: Verso.
Harvey, David. 2013. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution.
London/New York: Verso.
Tere are, you see, two ways of reading a book: you either see it as a box with
something inside and start looking for what it signifes, and then if youre
even more perverse or depraved you set of after signifers. And you treat the
next book like a box contained in the frst or containing it. And you anno-
tate and interpret and question, and write a book about the book, and so on
and on. Or theres the other way: you see the book as a little non-signifying
machine, and the only question is Does it work, and how does it work?
Tis second way of readings quite diferent from the frst, because it relates
a book directly to whats Outside. A book is a little cog in a much more
complicated external machinery. (Deleuze 1995: 78)
Here, then, are three little cogs in the complicated machinery of fnance capital:
Jonathan Crarys 24/7, Franco Bifo Berardis Te Uprising and David Harveys
Rebel Cities. Each book proposes an analysis of capitalism and the fnancial markets
with respect to a particular problem: sleep or the lack thereof in 24/7, resistance
through poetry in Te Uprising and resistance through urban movements in Rebel
Cities. Besides shedding light on these various issues, these publications connect
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to their general topic, fnance capitalism, in very diferent ways. Tey may all be
scathingly critical and yet they dont work in the same way. Te question of how, and
whether, these books work is particularly important in the context of the activism
that distinguishes some of the authors whose books are under discussion.
In 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Crary sets out to explore the efects
that nonstop capitalism and constant consumption have had on our collective and
individual experiences of time in general, and sleep in particular. Te premise of
Crarys argument is that capitalism, in its unrelenting urge to extract value, has
found its last frontier in sleep as a human need and interval of time that cannot be
colonized and harnessed to a massive engine of proftability because nothing of
value can be extracted from it (Crary 2013: 1011). As a result, the tendency on
all fronts is to reduce sleeping hours as much as possible: 24/7 versus Sleep! Crary
opens his discussion with a handful of intriguing cases in point, including propos-
als for mirror satellites that refect sunlight to industrial centres around the clock,
military research programs for the reduction of the need for sleep in soldiers, and
torture through sleep deprivation (18). Tese examples show that the problem
of sleep is inextricably linked to issues of illumination and visibility, states of (un)
consciousness and their importance, and the body as a political site. In short, Crary
makes a convincing argument for the interrelation of physiological needs and socio-
cultural and political attitudes and behaviours.
Crary uses 24/7 as shorthand for the temporality that characterizes the capitalist
(and neoconservative) war on sleep. It is the non-stop life-world of twenty-frst-
century capitalism (8), a static redundancy (89), a time of indiference (9), of
ermanent expenditure (10), a zone of insensibility, of amnesia, of what defeats the
possibility of experience (17), a time without time (29), an ever more congealed
and futureless present (35) and many more. In a 24/7 world, the scandal of sleep
consists in its uselessness and intrinsic passivity, its irrationality and irrelevance
to the operations of the mind (1013). Sleep, we will learn, is the recurrence on
our lives of a waiting, of a pause. Sleep is a remission, a release from the constant
continuity of 24/7; it is a form of time that leads us elsewhere than to the things
we own or are told we need (126). So against the crude dismissal of sleep in capital-
ism, politics and even philosophy, Crary raises his 128-page polemic. And a polemic
it is: full of well-worn arguments and aggravating inconsistencies, as well as quick
and dirty attacks against the wrong opponents.
First of all, any spa owner would contest Crarys assertion that sleep is useless, pas-
sive and unproftable. Tere is, after all, an entire industry around rest, recuperation
and relaxation, ranging from wellness institutes to sleeping clinics and medications.
Instead of considering sleep impossible to commodify, it may be more interesting
to ask how an indispensable physiological function is captured by various markets.
For, as entrepreneurs in the feld well know, sleep does obviously have important
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bodily functions and is essential for the operations of the mind.
1
Crary pits capital
against sleep in a way that isnt quite convincing.
Now, as for well-worn arguments, there is the acceleration hypothesis. In Chapters
2 and 3, the reader encounters the usual suspects of cultural pessimism since the
1970s: information and communication technologies (ICT), television, the inter-
net. Te individuals constant access to ICT and perpetual availability result in the
acceleration of social life to a point where the singularity of place and event are
annihilated and we live in a monotonous, high-speed present. It is telling that
Paul Virilio isnt acknowledged once, for he is rehashed nonstop (Crary wrote the
introduction to the 2010 edition of Virilios Te Aesthetics of Disappearance). Tis
unacknowledged but traceable afliation comes with the moralistic divide between
bad speed as well as technology and good slowness and chronodiversity, which
have been lost over the last few decades. Occasionally, Crary suggests that capital-
ism may have increased the complexity of lived experience, for instance when he
suggests that 24/7 is also a dense layering of time (84). But more often than not
our access to the world has been depleted of complexity, drained of whatever is
unplanned and unforeseen (59).
Tis depletion and drainage are the cause for the impaired or diminished perceptual
capabilities combined with routinized, habitual, and trance-like behaviour that
characterizes us (23). Tis is where 24/7 most clearly rejoins Crarys previous work
in the theory and history of perception. Te argument on perceptual incapacita-
tion culminates in the reference to a 2006 study suggesting a correlation between
television viewing by very young children and autism (85). Crary notes that this
study has been thoroughly criticized but returns to the correlation at the end of
his book, this time with authoritative quotations from Guy Debord. Crary asks,
How much of the blogging transpiring globallyis equivalent to the mass autism
Debord noted? (120) May I venture to say: none of it! Nor is autism equivalent to
the kind of zoned-out, inattentive semi-automatism Crary suggests (see Mottron
2011; Manning 2013). One may (or may not) forgive Debord for making such
correlations in the 1960s. In 2013, I expect more consideration, especially from one
of our foremost scholar of perception. And even more particularly from someone
who, thirty pages above, has noted that a growing range of emotional states have
been incrementally pathologized in order to create vast new markets for previ-
ously unneeded products (55). Is it possible that autism is one of these proftable
pathologies exploited by studies such as the one Crary quotes? But such sensitivi-
ties or incoherencies arent Crarys concern: Regardless of what future research may
prove or disprove concerning a link between television and autism, his point is
made (86, emphasis added).
Further unconvincing invectives come as a somewhat outdated conception of tel-
evision demonstrated with recourse to its ruinous efects on very young children
(7986) and a very ungenerous reading of Blade Runner (sans useful references to
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the flm demonstrating the more theoretical claims) (1014). But instead of giving
more examples, Id like to answer the questions I raised at the beginning through
Gilles Deleuze: does it work? And how? Crary inserts himself into late capitalism
as the resigned debunker-and-unveiler of our collective false consciousness, of the
illusion one can outwit the system, of the fantasy that asymmetrical relation of
individual to network can be creatively played to the formers advantage (46). He
quotes Giorgio Agambens apparatus theory to remind us that it is impossible
for the subject of an apparatus to use it in the right way. Tose who continue to
promote similar arguments are, for their part, the product of the media apparatus
in which they are captured (47). Tere you go, this is how it works: be smart-and-
resigned, or be the dupe of the apparatus.
Sleep is the title of the last section in Franco Berardis Te Uprising. After dis-
tinguishing between irony and cynicismIrony implies the infnite [and play-
ful] process of interpretation, whereas cynicism results from a (lost) faithBifo
ofers this gem: Te ironist sleeps happily because nothing can awake her from
her dreams. Te cynicist sleeps a light sleep, he dreams nightmares, and he gets up
as soon as power calls him (Berardi 2012: 166, 169). Reading this after 24/7, it is
hard not to think of Crary as the sleepless, exhausted cynic. Bifo, on the contrary,
seems to have gotten a good nights sleep and is now awakeningfull of subversive
irony. Te imagery is not gratuitous, for both Crary and Bifo have their respective
theories of the awakening as a metaphor for an individuals or a societys coming-
to-consciousness. For Crary, not surprisingly, this whole category of fgures and
metaphors is now incongruous in the face of a global system that never sleeps
(Crary 2013: 24). If you dont sleep, you cant wake up. Te imagery plays nicely into
Crarys defeatism. Bifo, starting with the very title of his book, is all rise and shine!:
[T]he depth of the catastrophe represented by the collapse [of the global economy
after 2008] is awakening hidden potencies of the social brain (Berardi 2012: 7).
After Crarys dismissal of everything, Bifos opening remarks about emancipation
and conscious mobilization are quite touching. He, who for years spoke in the name
of social depression, is now expecting the restoration of democracy, the return of
social solidarity, and the reversal of fnancial dictatorship (9).
To be sure, muchindeed very muchof Bifos writing will sound familiar to those
who have followed him through the last decade. His thoughts on the postfuturistic
condition (81), characterized by a loss of faith in notions like infnite growth
proft and prosperity for all, are straight out of After the Future (2011). Further, old
but still prominent enemies are: neoliberalism, depression (plus fear, anxiety, panic)
as a generalized social condition, and semio-capital (i.e., exchangeable, dereferen-
tialized information indexed to monetary value). He repeatedly deplores the frst
generation that learned more words from a machine than from their mothers (101,
141). Twice we go through the deterritorialization of the bourgeoisie, the class of
the bourg, the city into a globalized fnancial elite (74, 110). Bifo is not tired of his
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refrains, and he admits it (39). (Te book is a collection of various texts written
in 2011 and, let it be said, sometimes poorly edited together.)
But this time around, there is hope: A light of possible intelligence and openness
seems to come not from philosophy, but from art (43). Tis is the central thesis of
the book. Bifo wants to show up ways of subverting the subsumption and subjuga-
tion of the biopolitical sphere of afection and language to fnancial capitalism
from the unusual perspectives of poetry and sensibility (13). Finance versus Poetry!
All this sounds very diferent from his call for a withdrawal into inactivity, silence
and passive sabotage from only two years ago (Berardi 2011: 37). Bifos newfound
enthusiasm is the true contribution of this book. Terefore a presentation of the
argument that leads him there is in order.
In the age of fnancial and semio-capitalism, the linguistic sign is emancipated
from its referential function and circulates as exchangeable information (Berardi
2012: 139, 147). Te infnite acceleration of the infosphere has further fattened
language into techno-linguistic automatisms (910). To be brief, all of this freezes
the afective potencies of language (18). Poetry, on the other hand, makes use of
language in a way that goes beyond its informational content: We call poetry the
semiotic concatenation that exceeds the sphere of exchange and the codifed cor-
respondence of the signifer and the signifed (149); Poetry is the reopening of
the indefnite, the ironic act of exceeding the established meaning of words (158).
Bifo then turns to Ludwig Wittgenstein and the dictum that the limits of my
language mean the limits of my world (see 15556). Tis means that, ultimately,
and somewhat disappointingly, language does not go beyond meaning and refer-
ence. Poetry does not disrupt the sociopolitical sphere through its asignifying and
afective forces (although Flix Guattari has been cited on this issue just a page
before Wittgenstein). Its task is ultimately to invent new meanings, for what lies
beyond the limits of language will only be able to be lived and experienced once
our language is able to elaborate that sphere of Being that lies beyond the present
limit (156). Bifo condenses this task in the concept of irony, the ethical form of
the excessive power of languagethe infnite game that words play to create and
to skip and to shufe meaning (158).
Te Uprising has a number of faws, of which Ill point out a few. First of all, there
is a complete lack of contemporary poetry. All we get is some Rainer Maria Rilke
(140, 148) and some W. B. Yeats (3536); and yes, it is Te Second Coming.
Readers who are interested in the aesthetics of recent resistance movements or in
relations between art and activism wont fnd much in Bifos book. Tey may fare
better consulting the recent bilingual issue of esse on Indignation or the Out of
the Mouths of Casseroles series in Wi: Journal of Mobile Media. A closer look at
activist art of recent years brings out another inadequacy of Te Uprising for, inci-
dentally, some of the most powerful artistic productions have been non-linguistic
and asignifying. Writing from Montreal, I can indicate Anarchopanda and the
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banging of pots (casseroles) as two aesthetico-political interventions that were part
of the 2012 student protests against tuition hikes and that resisted communication
through language. Anarchopanda, a giant panda suit donned by a college teacher,
ofered cuddles to police ofcers in an attempt to reroute the negative charge of
the protests and to blur the boundaries between the hard bodies of the police and
the soft bodies of the students (Tain 2012). His (its?) ambiguous embodiment
in a cuddly, nonhuman animal was successful in subverting the politics of identity
that fuelled the confict between students and police. Te casseroles, Joseph Rosen
writes in the same issue of Wi, were an efcient non-linguistic strategy to gather
political force across generations: everyone from small children to retired neighbours
whacked their pots and pans in solidarity. Moreover, this resistance against preemp-
tive arrests under the Law 78 were immediately efective: Overnight, the arrests
dropped from 518 to four (Rosen 2012). And not a word was said! Need I add that
one of Occupys characteristics was its refusal to explain itself or make demands, to
avoid being captured and neutralized by the standard procedures of political com-
munication? Im not saying that theres anything wrong with language, but in light
of these political strategies that bypass language partially or completely, Berardis
reduction of activist art to poetry is somewhat disappointing.
Clearly, Bifo prefers the theoretical plane and has a penchant for writing in catchy
vignettes. One efect of this style is that he churns out concepts by the page and,
inevitably, gives them short shrift. For example, within two and a half pages Bifo
introduces, critiques and is done with swarm behaviour and networks that produce
simplifed pathways and complexity-reducing interfaces (1416). Readers with
an invested interest in network theory and their relational processuality may want to
look elsewhere for useful and innovative concepts (for instance, in Anna Munsters
2013 An Aesthesia of Networks).
So if Im not reading this book for its theory, nor for case studies in activist poetry,
whats the work that it does? Te Uprising is the gesture of a renewed implication
with capitalist rule, of continued struggle against the repressive forces of neolib-
eralism. I read this book for its pronounced appreciation of playfulness, for the
importance of useless excess, for its commitment to unproductive expenditure, to
use Georges Batailles well-known notion. And for its resistance to resigned cyni-
cism (although, unlike Bifo, I can imagine that cynics sleep quite well, too).
Finally, then, there is David Harveys Rebel Cities. Tis collection of previously pub-
lished material is divided into two sections, each corresponding roughly to an aspect
of Harveys twofold main argument. On the one hand, he argues that urbanization
(besides warfare) has been one major solution to the capital surplus absorption
problem (7 passim), an argument that goes back to his 1985 Te Urbanisation of
Capital and is updated here in Section 1: Te Right to the City. On the other
hand, Harvey holds that this absorption of surplus capital through urbanization
has come to an end (Harvey 2013: 22).
2
In Section 2: Rebel Cities, he therefore
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describes forms of collective resistance and modes of organization that make it
possible to reclaim the right to the city.
Tis right, a central concept of Harveys, is a focused collective right; it is inclusive
and seeks a unity from within an incredible diversity of fragmented social spaces
and locations (137). Te right to the city should not be thought of as a right to
that which already exists, but as a right to rebuild and re-create the city as a socialist
body politic in a completely diferent image (138). It is therefore constituted in the
frst place by establishing democratic control over the deployment of the surpluses
through urbanization, which have been increasingly controlled by private interest
and neoliberal politics over the last thirty years (23). Te underlying premise is that
urban space can act as an incubator of revolutionary ideas, ideals, and movements
(xvi). By making the city the setting of revolutionary potential, Harvey takes issue
with both Marxists who oftentimes dismiss the city as a merely reformist space (viii,
34), and conventional or bourgeois economics which treats urbanization as some
side-bar to the more important afairs that go on in some fctional entity called
the national economy (28). Putting urbanization centre stage, the author is able
to trace an interesting history of the relation between urbanization and national
economy. For instance, Harvey shows that booms in urban property markets have
often sparked major economic crises on a national (and nowadays global) scale. Tis
means that the recent fnancial crisis is not, as often proclaimed by economists such
as Robert Shiller, an exception to the rule but rather an intensifcation of historical
precedents. Harvey subsequently traces the creative destruction of urban spaces
through seemingly progressive practices of micro-credit systems, property rights
for slum-dwellers (Chapter1), the predatory practices of the credit system (Ch.2),
the privatization of public space (Ch.3) and the branding of cities to commod-
ify their cultural capital (Ch.4). Tanks to the detailed documentation, Harveys
account goes beyond many cursory histories of neoliberalism (including Bifos and
Crarys) and can be of great interest to researchers and non-experts in the feld.
Chapter 5, which opens Section 2: Rebel Cities, can count as the core of the book.
Taking of from a quick survey of recent urban resistance movements, Harvey asks
how such an ocean of more difuse oppositional movements that lack overall politi-
cal coherence can be made sustainable (119). He makes three connected points to
work towards a solution. First, an efective struggle against class divisions depends
on the strong and vibrant support from popular forces assembled at the surround-
ing neighbourhood and community level (138). Secondly, then, the concept of
work needs to be expanded to go beyond industrial forms of labour and to include
all kinds of value-adding activities along chains of supply (139). Finally, as a result,
public spaces and the private living spaces of workers constitute the contemporary
sites of class struggle because they are the prime sites of surplus value production
today (140). All of this is to reconceptualize the proletariat to include the hordes
of unorganized urbanization producers (130) and to reconsider rights claims as
part and parcel of anti-capitalist movements (12829). As an insightful example,
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Harvey discusses the case of El Alto in Bolivia and its resistance to the capitalist
pressures from the capital La Paz. He shows how the relatively successful model
of El Alto is based on a complex of transversal and mutually sustaining relations
between a) practices of local democracy resting on indigenous traditions, b) neigh-
bourhood associations, c) residual collective class consciousness and d) sectoral
associations of various groups in the population, such as street vendors, transport
workers, and the like and more conventional unions with a local, regional, and
national organizational structure (14648).
Harveys examples and analyses are informative, detailed and convincing. On the
downside, it occasionally seems that, given his specifc lineage of Marxist think-
ing, he has to work his way out of concepts of work and proletariat but also out
of organizational models that have been out of use for long. Tat contemporary
value-adding activities go far beyond conventional production practices and that the
distinction between work and leisure is increasingly unstable is, I reckon, accepted
theory. Ten again, Harvey does well to remind his North American readers that
thousands of exploited factory workers very well exist in other parts of the world.
Another letdownpossibly due to my very own expectations before reading the
bookconsists in the fact that Rebel Cities has very little to say about Cairo, Tunis,
London, Athens, Madrid or New York and other sites of recent urban resistance
movements. Te analysis of El Alto is the only extended case study of recent rebel
cities. Francophone readers interested in the subject may consult the 2012 series
Villes rebelles in the Courrier international (in collaboration with Le Mouv).
Tus Rebel Cities works at two diferent speeds. It has an urgent and important
project that it fuels with much erudition and many interesting observations. At
the same time, however, it seems that the books conceptual apparatus somewhat
lags behind the reality it discusses. Nonetheless, as its own little machine, Harveys
Rebel Cities does its work and connects to the Outside of fnancial capitalism in
interesting ways.
Notes
1. Tis much is clear even though sleep scientists are not quite sure why exactly it is that
we sleep. See Drew 2013.
2. Im reviewing the 2013 paperback edition of Rebel Cities. An earlier hardcover edition
was published in 2012.
References
Berardi, Franco. 2011. After the Future. Oakland, CA: AK Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. Negotiations, 19721990. New York: Columbia University Press.
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Drew, Liam. 2013. Wonder of Slumber: Why We Sleep is One of Lifes Enduring
Mysteries. New Scientist 2902: 3839.
esse arts + opinions. 2013. 77 [Indignation].
Manning, Erin. 2013. Always More Tan One. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Mottron, Laurent. 2011. Te Power of Autism. Nature 479: 335.
Rosen, Joseph. 2012. Multigenerational Casserole Orchestras: Te New Face of Anarchist
Insurgency. Wi: Journal of Mobile Media 6(2) [Out of the Mouths of Casseroles. Part
2]: http://wi.mobilities.ca/ wpcontent/ uploads/ 2012/06/multigenerational_casseroles_
assembly_jrosen1.pdf.
Tain, Alanna. 2012. Anarchopandas Soft Subversions. Wi: Journal of Mobile Media
6(2) [Out of the Mouths of Casseroles. Part 2]: http://wi.mobilities.ca/wpcontent/
uploads/2012/06/Anarchopandas-Soft-Subversions-by-A-Tain_v03.pdf.

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