Off case

Global capital has entered into the era of cognitive labor

an affective process of subjectivization that transforms
their intellectual production into the fuel for neoliberal
economics. Even if the content of their interrogation is
radical it ignores the form of debate as a semiotic
economy which precludes its potential
Bifo '7 (Franco Berardi, Professor of Social History of Communication at the Academia di belle Arti in
Milan, and Founder of A/traverse, Technology and Knowledge in a Universe of Indetermination, SubStance
#112, Vol. 36 no. 1, trans. Giuseppina Mecchia, pp. 68-72)

When we talk about the mental nature of the productive process we

mean that the functions assigned by governments to the productive

processes are subsumed and internalized by them . There is no longer any
distinction between processes of social labor and the general governance of society. Of course, there
remains the fiction of a political decision, of a political representation , but the
actual ability to govern the social processes on the part of the political will can only play an extremely
marginal role. It isnt politics (with all its complicated mechanisms of representation, decision, and
sanction) that decides on the fundamental questions arising in the spheres of technology and finance or in
the creation of an interface connecting technology, finance, society, languages, and the imaginary.
Government is integrated into the circulation of information, if we consider information in its fullest sense,
as an algorithm of processes that can be activated by techno-social automatisms. Programming,
understood as the elaboration of a software able to analyze, simplify, systematize, and mechanize entire
sequences of human work, is at the core of government action, if we call government a function of decision
and regulation. Within the process of techno-social elaboration, of software development, we see
the configuration of alternatives which have completely
disappeared from the scene of political representation and of ideology.
According to the user interfaces realized by the programmer, technology can function either as an element
of control or as an agent of liberation from work. The political problem is entirely absorbed within the
activity of the mental worker, and of the programmer in particular. The problem of the alternative, of a
different social use of certain activities, can no longer be detached from the very forms of this activity. The
person who works in a machine shop, or on the assembly line, has to separate herself from her workplace
if she wants to rediscover the conditions for a political transformation, if she wants to upset the political
and technological modes of oppression. This is why, during the proto- industrial era, it was necessary to
build a political organization external to the factory and to the working knowledge of the worker. But this is
no longer the case when work becomes an activity of coordination, invention, understanding, and
programming. In the age of mental labor, the problem of organization and of political

action can no longer be separated from the one concerning the

paradigms of the productive operation . Software programming reveals the close
relation between dependent labor and creative activity; in this case, we observe how the mental work of
the programmer acquires a political function of transformation within his very way of operating, and not
only a productive function of valorization. The two functions can be distinguished in the sphere of project-
oriented consciousness, but they live on the same operational plane. The consequence of the increasingly
mental nature of social labor is that politics is replaced by an internalized function of social production and
becomes a specific and decisive choice between the alternative uses of a certain knowledge, an invention
of interfaces situated between crystallized information and social use, between cognitive architecture and
an ecology of communication. Obviously, this doesnt prevent politics from continuing to celebrate its ever
more excessive rituals. But these rituals have lost their efficacy; their only consequences are internal to
politics itself. But if this is what is happening to politics, what about economics, both as a discipline and as
a field defining human activity? Is economics still a science when the determining factors in the economic
field are becoming unstable and immaterial, when they seem to elude the quantifying rules which are at
the core of economics as a conceptualizing system? Keynes, the post-Keynesians and the neo-classicists
alike cast the economy in a model in which a few constants drive the entire machinery. The model we now
need would have to see the economy as ecology, environment, configuration, and as composed of
several integrative spheres: a microeconomy of individuals and firms, especially transnational ones; a
macroeconomy of national governments; and a world economy. Every earlier economic theory
postulated that one such economy totally controls; all others are dependent and functions. [] But
economic reality now is one of three such economies. []. None totally controls the other three; none is
totally controlled by the others. Yet none is fully independent from the others, either. Such complexity can
barely be described. It cannot be analyzed since it allows of no prediction. To give us a functioning
economic theory, we thus need a new synthesis that simplifies but so far there is no sign of it. And if no
such synthesis emerges, we might be at the end of economic theory.25 Economics became a science
when, with the expansion of capitalism, rules were established as general principles for productive activity
and exchange. But if we want these rules to function we must be able to quantify the basic productive act.
The time-atom described by Marx is the keystone of modern economics. The ability to quantify the time
necessary for the production of a commodity makes possible the regulation of the entire set of economic
relations. But when the main element in the global productive cycle is the unforeseeable work of the mind ,
the unforeseeable work of language, when self-reproducing
information becomes the universal commodity , it is no longer possible to reduce
the totality of exchanges and relations to an economic rule. In any system as complex as the economy of a
developed country, the statistically insignificant events, the events at the margin, are likely to be the
decisive events, short range at least. By definition they can neither be anticipated nor prevented. Indeed,
they cannot always be identified even after they have had their impact.26 Economic science doesnt seem
able to understand the current transition because it is founded on a quantitative and mechanistic
paradigm that could comprehend and regulate industrial production, the physical manipulation of
mechanical matter, but is unable to explain and regulate the process of
immaterial production based on an activity that cant easily be
reduced to quantitative measurements and the repetition of constants: mental
activity. Information and communication technologies are disrupting the social and economical
mechanisms of the developed countries. The current indicators of traditional macroeconomics are
becoming obsolete and of little significance; moreover, the place and function of economics itself as we
still see it are put into question. The phenomenon of growth without job creation devalues a whole series of
concepts. This is how even the concept of productivity fails to resist the challenge raised by the new
realities. With the new technologies, the majority of production costs are determined by research and
equipment expenses that actually precede the productive process. Little by little, in digitalized and
automated enterprises, production is no longer subjected to the variations concerning the quantity of
operational factors. Marginal cost, marginal profits: these bases of neoclassical economic calculations have
lost a good part of their meaning. The traditional elements of salary and price calculation are crumbling
down.27 Robins analysis shows that economic categories cant explain the majority of the processes that
are truly meaningful in our time, and the reason clearly consists in the fact that mental work is not
quantifiable like the work performed by an industrial worker.Therefore, the determination of
value the keystone of classical economy both as a science and as daily economic practice

becomes aleatory and indefinable . In Symbolic Exchange and Death, Baudrillard wrote: 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 principle of simulation governs us
now, rather than the outdated reality principle. Finalities have disappeared, the models generate us now.
[] Capital no longer belongs to the order of political economy: it operates with political economy as its
simulated model. With the digitalizing of production, the abstraction of capital makes a qualitative leap.
Not only is production an abstract production of value, but the economic indicators are autonomous from
the system of production, and are constituted as a synchronic, structural, self- referential, and autonomous
system, independent from the real world. The increasingly financial nature of our economy means exactly
this. The stock markets are the places where obsessions, psychological expectations, fears, play, and
apocalyptic ideologies regulate the game. Realist economies were governed by their goals, the nave goal
of producing use value for the satisfaction of specific needs, or the subtler goal of valorization as the
increase of invested capital. Now, instead, it is impossible to explain our economies on the basis of their
goals, whether we identify them with the intentions of certain individuals or certain groups or with the
goals of an entire society. The economy is governed by a code, not by its
goals : Finality is there in advance, inscribed in the code. We can see that nothing has changed
the order of goals has simply ceded its place to a molecular play, as
the order of signifieds has yielded to the play of infinitesimal
signifiers, reduced to their aleatory commutation .29 The economy therefore
appears as a hyper-reality, a simulated, double, and artificial world that cannot be translated in terms of
real production. The mental nature of todays economy is not only expressed by the technological
transformation of the productive process, but by the global code in charge of interpreting the process
constituting our entire world. Consequently, the science of economics can no longer explain the
fundamental dynamics governing humanitys productive activities; nor can it explain their
crisis. Economics has to be replaced by a global science whose characteristics and field of inquiry are still
unknown: a science that would be able to study the processes of formation of Cyberspace, understood as
the global network of signs-commodities. In an interview published in 1993 by the Californian magazine
Wired, Peter Drucker develops once again the theme of the inadequacy of economic categories associated
with the digitalization of productive processes: International economic theory is obsolete. The traditional
factors of production land, labor, and capital are becoming restraints rather than driving forces.
Knowledge is becoming the one critical factor of production. It has two incarnations: knowledge applied to
existing processes, services, and products is productivity; knowledge applied to the new is innovation. []
Knowledge has become the central, key resource that knows no geography. It underlies the most
significant and unprecedented social phenomenon of this century. No class in history has ever risen as fast
as the blue-collar worker and no class has fallen as fast. All within less than a century. Furthermore,
Drucker remarks that the concept of intellectual property, which is the juridical concept that was at the
basis of classical economy and of the capitalist system, no longer has any meaning in an age when the
circulating commodity is information and the market is the info-sphere: We have to rethink
the whole concept of intellectual property , which was focused on the printed word.
Perhaps within a few decades, the distinction between electronic transmissions and the printed word will
have disappeared. The only solution may be a universal licensing system. Where you basically become a
subscriber, and where it is taken for granted that everything that is published is reproduced. In other
words, if you dont want everybody to know, dont talk about it. The system of property
regarding the products of intellectual labor no longer works in the
age of the reproducibility of information . As a conclusion to these observations on
the obsolescence of economics as a generalized interpretive code, I would like to quote Andr Gorz, who
writes in his Mtamorphoses du travail: Discipline by means of money is a hetero-regulation that interrupts
the communicational infrastructure ensuring the symbolic reproduction of the experiential world. This
means that all the activities that transmit or reproduce cultural acquisitions, knowledge, taste, manners,
language, mores [], and that allow us to find our bearings in the world as givens, certitudes, values, and
self-explanatory norms; all these activities cannot be regulated by money or by the state without causing
serious pathologies in our world of experience. Money (i.e. economics) and the State (i.e. politics) are no
longer able to govern or to discipline the world of production, now that its center is no longer a de-brained
force, a uniform and quantifiable time of manual work. That center is now occupied by mind flows, by the
ethereal substance of intelligence, which eludes every measurement and cannot be subjected to any rule
without inducing enormous pathologies and causing a truly maddening paralysis [destruction] of cognition
and affectivity.
Their activism participates in the circulation of semiotics,
global capital is not threatened by their pleas for change
but instead vampyrically siphon it as a way of shifting to
more insidious forms of subjecitvizationonly a strategy
of withdrawal and collapse can change the form and
content and capital
Bifo '11 (Franco Berardi, Professor of Social History and Communication at the Academia di belle Arti
in Milan and Founder of A/Traverse, After the Future, ed. Genesko%26Thoburn, AKPress, p. 141-47)

Activism has generally conceived the process of subjectivation in terms of

resistance. In his book dedicated to Foucault, Gilles Deleuze speaks about subjectivity, and
identifies processes of subjectivation and resistance: Is not life this capacity to
resist force? (Deleuze 1988: 77). I think that it is time to ask: what if society can no more resist the destroying
effects of unbounded capitalism? What if society can no more resist the devastating power of financial accumulation? The
identification of the subject with resistance is dangerous in a certain sense. Deleuze himself has written that when we
We have to disentangle autonomy
escape we are not only escaping, but also looking for a new weapon.
from resistance. And if we want to do it we have to disentangle desire from energy. The prevailing focus of modern
capitalism has been energy, the ability to produce, to compete, to dominate. A sort of Energolatria has dominated the
cultural scene of the West since Faust to the Futurists. The ever growing availability of energy has been its dogma. Now
we know that energy is not boundless. In the social psyche of the West, energy is fading away. I think that we
should reframe the concept and the practice of autonomy from this point of view.
The social body has become unable to reaffirm its rights against the wild
assertiveness of capital, because the pursuit of rights can never be dissociated
from the exercise of force. When workers were strong in the 1960s and 70s they did
not restrict themselves to asking for their rights, to peaceful demonstrations of their will. They acted in
solidarity, refusing to work, redistributing wealth, sharing things, services and spaces. Capitalists, on their side, do
not merely ask or demonstrate, they do not simply declare their wish, they enact if. They make things
happen, they invest, disinvest, displace, they destroy and they build. Only force
makes autonomy possible in the relation between capital and society. But what is force?
What is force nowadays? The identification of desire with energy has produced the identification of force with violence that
turned out so badly for the Italian movement in the 1970s and 80s. We have to distinguish energy and desire. Energy is
falling, desire has to be saved nevertheless. Similarly, we have to distinguish force from violence. Fighting power with
violence is suicidal or useless, nowadays. How can we think of activists going against professional organizations of killers
in the mold of Blackwater, Haliburton, secret services, mafias? Only suicide has proved to be efficient in the struggle
against power. And actually suicide has become decisive in the history of our time. The dark side of the multitude meets
here the loneliness of death. Activist culture should avoid the danger of becoming a culture of resentment.
Acknowledging the irreversibility of the catastrophic trends that capitalism has
inscribed in the history of society does not mean to renounce it. On the contrary,
we have today a new cultural task: to live the inevitable with a relaxed soul. To call
forth a big wave of withdrawal, of massive dissociation, of desertion from the
scene of the economy, of non-participation in the fake show of politics. The crucial
focus of social transformation is creative singularity. The existence of singularities is not to be
conceived as a personal way to salvation, they may become a contagious force. Yes we can, the headline of the
campaign of Barack Obama, the three words that mobilized the hope and political energies of the American people in
2008, have a disturbing echo just one year after the victory of the democratic candidate. These words sound like an
exorcism much more than like a promise. Yes we can may be read as a lapse in the Freudian sense, a sign coming from
the collective subconscious, a diversion from the hidden intuition that we can no more. The mantra of Barack Obama has
gathered the energies of the best part of the American people, and collected the best of the American cultural legacy. But
what about the results? So far Obama has been unable to deal with the global environmental threats, the effects of the
geopolitical disaster produced by Cheney-Bush, the effects of the powerful lobbies imposing the interest of the
When we think of the ecological
corporations (for instance, of the private health insurers).
catastrophe, of geopolitical threats, of economic collapse provoked by the
financial politics of neoliberalism, its hard to dispel the feeling that irreversible
trends are already at work inside the world machine. Political will seems
paralyzed in the face of the economic power of the criminal class. The age of
modern social civilization seems on the brink of dissolution, and it is hard to imagine how
society will be able to react. Modern civilization was based on the convergence and integration of the capitalist
exploitation of labor force and the political regulation of social conflict. The regulator State, the heir of Enlightenment and
Socialism has been the guarantor of human rights and the negotiator of social balance. When, at the end of a ferocious
class struggle between work and capital but also inside the capitalist class itself the financial class has seized power
by destroying the legal regulation and transforming the social composition, the entire edifice of modern civilization has
Social Darwinist ideology has legitimized the violent imposition of the
begun to crumble.
law of the strongest, and the very foundations of democracy have been reduced to
rubble. This accelerated destruction of tolerance, culture and human feelings has given an unprecedented impulse to
the process of accumulation and has increased the velocity and the extent of economic growth throughout the last two
decades of the 20th century. But all this has also created the premises of a war against human society that is underway in
the new century.
The war against society is waged at two different levels: at the
economic level it is known under the name of privatization, and it is based on the
idea that every fragment and every cell of the biological, affective linguistic
spheres have to be turned into profit machines. The effect of this privatization is the
impoverishment of daily life, the loss of sensibility in the fields of sex, communication, and human relationships, and also
the increasing inequality between hyper-rich minority and a majority of dispossessed. At the social level this war is waged
in terms of criminalization and in-securization of the territory and of economic life. In large areas of the planet, that are
growing and growing in extent, production and exchange have become the ground of violent confrontation between
military groups and criminal organization. Slavery, blackmail, extortion, murder are integral parts of the lexicon of
Economy. Scattered insurrections will take place in the coming years, but we should not expect much from them. Theyll
be unable to touch the real centers of power because of the militarization of metropolitan space, and they will not be able
to gain much in terms of material wealth or political power. As the long wave of counter-globalization moral protests could
not destroy neoliberal power, so the insurrections will not find a solution, not unless a new consciousness and a new
sensibility surfaces and spreads, changing everyday life, and creating Non-Temporary Autonomous Zones rooted in the
culture and consciousness of the global network. Full employment is over. The world does not need so much labor and so
much exploitation. A radical reduction of labor-time is necessary. Basic income has to be affirmed as a right to life
independent of employment and disjoined from the lending of labor-time. Competence, knowledge, and skills have to be
We should
separated from the economic context of exchange value, and rethought in terms of free social activity.
not look at the current recession only from an economic point of view. We must
see it essentially as an anthropological turning point that is going to change the
distribution of world resources and world power. Europe is doomed to lose its economic privilege,
as 500 years of colonialism are ending. The debt that Western people have accumulated is not
only economic but also moral: the debt of oppression, violence and genocide has
to be paid now, and its not going to be easy. A large part of the European population is not prepared
to accept the redistribution of wealth that the recession will impose. Europe, stormed by waves of migration, is going to
face a growing racist threat. Ethnic war will be difficult to avoid.
In the US, the victory of Barack
Obama marks the beginning of the end of the Western domination that was the
premise of the modern capitalist system. A wave of non-identitarian indigenous
Renaissance is rising, especially in Latin America. The privatization of basic needs (housing, transportation,
food) and social services is based on the cultural identification of wealth and wellbeing with the amount of private property
owned. In the anthropology of modern capitalism, wellbeing has been equated with acquisition, never with enjoyment. In
the course of the social turmoil we are going to live through in the coming years, the identification of wellbeing with
property has to be questioned. Its a political task, but above all it is a cultural task, and a psychotherapeutic one too.
When it comes to semiotic products private property becomes irrelevant, and in fact it is more and more difficult to enforce
it. The campaigns against piracy are paradoxical because the real pirates are the corporations that are desperately trying
to privatize the product of the collective intelligence, and artificially trying to impose a tax on the community of producers.
The products of collective intelligence are immanently common because knowledge can neither be fragmented nor
privately owned. A new brand of communism was already springing from the technological transformations of digital
networks, when the collapse of the financial markets and neoliberal ideology exposed the frailty of the foundations of
hyper-capitalism. Now we can predict a new wave of transformation from the current collapse of growth and debt, and of
private consumption as wellbeing. Because of these three forces commonality of knowledge, ideological crisis of private
ownership, mandatory communalisation of need a new horizon is visible and a new landscape is going to surface.
Communism is coming back. The old face of communism, based on the Will and voluntarism of an
avantgarde, and on the paranoid expectations of a new totality was defeated at the end of the 20th century and will
not be resurrected. A totally new brand of communism is going to surface as a form of
necessity, the inevitable outcome of the stormy collapse of the capitalist system.
The communism of capital is a barbarian necessity. We must put freedom in this necessity, we
need to make of this necessity a conscious organised choice. Communism is back, but we
should name it in a different way because historical memory identified this particular form of social organization with the
The historical communism of the 20th century was based on
political tyranny of a religion.
the idea of the primacy of totality over singularity. But the dialectical framework
that defined the communist movement of the 20th century has been completely
abandoned and nobody will resurrect it. The Hegelian ascendance played a major role in the
formation of that kind of religious belief that was labeled historicism. The Aufhebung (abolition of the real in favor of the
realization of the Idea) is the paranoid background of the whole conceptualization of communism. Inside that dialectical
framework, communism was viewed as an all encompassing totality expected to abolish and follow the capitalist all
encompassing totality. The subject (the will and action of the working class) was viewed as the instrument for the abolition
of the old and the instauration of the new. The industrial working class, being external to the production of concepts, could
only identify with the mythology of abolition and totalization, but the general intellect cannot do that. The general intellect
does not need an expressive subject, such as was the Leninist Party in the 20th century. The political expression of the
We have abandoned the
general intellect is at one with its action of knowing, creating, and producing signs.
ground of dialectics in favour of the plural grounds of the dynamic of
singularization and the multilayered co-evolution of singularities. Capitalism is
over, but it is not going to disappear. The creation of Non-Temporary Autonomous Zones is not going to
give birth to any totalization. We are not going to witness a cathartic event of revolution, well not see the sudden
In the following years well witness a sort of revolution without
breakdown of state power.
a subject. In order to subjectivate this revolution we have to proliferate
singularities. This, in my humble opinion, is our cultural and political task. After abandoning the field
of the dialectics of abolition and totalization, we are now trying to build a theory of
the dynamics of recombination and singularization, a concept that is clearly
drawn from the works of Flix Guattari, particularly from his last book,
Chaosmosis. By the word singularity I mean the expression of a never seen
before concatenation. The actor of this expression can be an individual, a
collective but also an event. We call it singularity if this actor recombines the multiple flows traversing its
field of existence following a principle that is not repetitive and referring to any preexisting form of subjected subjectivity.
By the world singularity, I mean an agency that does not follow any rule of conformity
and repetition, and is not framed in any historical necessity. Singularity is a process that is
It is the
not necessary, because it is not implied in the consequentiality of history neither logically nor materially.
emerging of a self-creative process. Rather than a swift change in the social
landscape, we should expect the slow surfacing of new trends: communities
abandoning the field the crumbling ruling economies, more and more individuals
giving up their search for a job and creating their own networks of services. The
dismantling of industry is unstoppable for the simple reason that social life does not need industrial labor anymore. The
myth of growth is going to be abandoned and people will look for new modes of wealth distribution. Singular communities
will transform the very perception of wellbeing and wealth in the sense of frugality and freedom. The cultural revolution
that we need in this transition leads from the perception of wealth as the private ownership of a growing amount of goods
that we cannot enjoy because we are too busy purchasing the money needed for acquisition, to the perception of wealth
as the enjoyment of an essential amount of things that we can share with other people. The de-privatization of services
and goods will be made possible by this much needed cultural revolution. This will not happen in a planned and uniformed
way, this will rather be the effect of the withdrawal of singular individuals and communities, and the result of the creation of
an economy of shared use of common goods and services and the liberation of time for culture, pleasure and affection.
While this process expands at the margins of society, the criminal class will hang on to its power and enforce more and
more repressive legislation, the majority of people will be increasingly aggressive and desperate. Ethnic civil war will
spread all over Europe, wrecking the very fabric of civil life. The proliferation of singularities (the withdrawal and building of
NonTemporary Autonomous Zones) will be a pacific process, but the conformist majority will react violently, and this is
already happening. The conformist majority is frightened by the fleeing away of intelligent energy and simultaneously is
attacking the expression of intelligent activity. The situation can be described as a fight between the mass ignorance
produced by mediatotalitarianism and the shared intelligence of the general intellect. We cannot predict what the outcome
of this process will be. Our task is to extend and protect the field of autonomy, and to avoid as much as possible any
violent contact with the field of aggressive mass ignorance. This strategy of non-confrontational withdrawal will not always
succeed. Sometimes confrontation will be made inevitable by racism and fascism. It is impossible to predict what has to
be done in the case of unwanted conflict. Non-violent reaction is obviously the best choice, but it will not always be
possible. The identification of wellbeing with private property is so deeply rooted that a barbarization of the human
environment cannot be completely ruled out. But the task of the general intellect is exactly this: fleeing from paranoia,
creating zones of human resistance, experimenting autonomous forms of production based on high-tech-low-energy
production whilst avoiding confrontation with the criminal class and the conformist population. Politics and therapy will
be one and the same activity in the coming time. People will feel hopeless and depressed and panicking, because they
are unable to deal with the post-growth economy, and because they will miss the dissolving modern identity. Our cultural
task will be attending to those people and taking care of their insanity, showing them the way of a happy adaptation at
hand. Our task will be the creation of social zones of human resistance that act like
zones of therapeutic contagion. The process of autonomization has not to be seen as Aufhebung, but as
therapy. In this sense it is not totalizing and intended to destroy and abolish the past. Like psychoanalytic
therapy it is rather to be considered as an unending process.

The affirmatives radical knowledge will only be funneled

into the increasing legitimacy of the contemporary
university that makes regimes of social death inevitable
Occupied UC Berkeley 10 (anonymous graduate student in
philosophy, The University, Social Death and the Inside Joke,
http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20100220181610620)
Universities may serve as progressive sites of inquiry in some cases,
yet this does not detract from the great deal of military and
corporate research , economic planning and, perhaps most
importantly, social conditioning occurring within their walls.
Furthermore, they serve as intense machines for the concentration of
privilege ; each university is increasingly staffed by overworked
professors and adjuncts, poorly treated maintenance and service staff. This remains only the
top of the pyramid, since a hyper educated, stable society along Western

lines can only exist by the intense exploitation of labor and

resources in the third world . Students are taught to be oblivious to
this fact; liberal seminars only serve to obfuscate the fact that they
are themselves complicit in the death and destruction waged on a
daily basis. They sing the college fight song and wear hooded sweatshirts (in the case of hip liberal
arts colleges, flannel serves the same purpose). As the Berkeley rebels observe, Social death is

our banal acceptance of an institutions meaning for our own lack

of meaning .[43] Our conception of the social is as the death of everything
sociality entails; it is the failure of communication, the refusal of
empathy, the abandonment of autonomy . Baudrillard writes that The
cemetery no longer exists because modern cities have entirely
taken over their function : they are ghost towns, cities of death . If the
great operational metropolis is the final form of an entire culture, then, quite simply, ours is a
culture of death .[44] By attempting to excel in a university setting,
we are resigning ourselves to enrolling in what Mark Yudoff so proudly calls a
cemetery, a necropolis to rival no other . Yet herein lies the punch
line. We are studying in the cemeteries of a nation which has a
cultural fetish for things that refuse to stay dead; an absolute
fixation with zombies . So perhaps the goal should not be to go Beyond Zombie Politics at
all. Writes Baudrillard: The event itself is counter-offensive and comes from
a strange source: in every system at its apex, at its point of
perfection, it reintroduces negativity and death .[45] The University,
by totalizing itself and perfecting its critiques, has spontaneously
generated its own antithesis . Some element of sociality refuses to
stay within the discourse of the social, the dead; it becomes undead,
radically potent. According to Steven Shaviros The Cinematic Body, zombies mark
the dead end or zero degree of capitalisms logic of endless
consumption and ever expanding accumulation , precisely because
they embody this logic so literally and to such excess.[46] In that sense,
they are almost identical to the mass, the silent majorities that
Baudrillard describe as the ideal form of resistance to the social: they
know that there is no liberation, and that a system is abolished only by pushing it
into hyperlogic , by forcing it into excessive practice which is
equivalent to a brutal amortization.[47] Zombies do not constitute a threat at first,
they shamble about their environments in an almost comic manner and are easily dispatched by a shotgun
students emerge from the university in which they
blast to the face. Similarly,
have been buried, engaging in random acts of symbolic
hyperconsumption and overproduction; perhaps an overly enthusiastic usage of a
classroom or cafeteria here and there, or a particularly moving piece of theatrical composition that is
easily suppressed. Disaster is consumed as cheesy spectacle, complete with incompetent reporting,
useless information bulletins, and inane attempts at commentary:[48] Shaviro is talking about Night of
the Living Dead, but he might as well be referring to the press coverage of the first California occupations.
Other students respond with horror to the encroachment of dissidents: the living characters are
concerned less about the prospect of being killed than they are about being swept away by mimesis of
returning to existence, after death, transformed into zombies themselves.[49] Liberal student
activists fear the incursions the mostf, as they are in many ways the
most invested in the fate of the contemporary university ; in many ways
their role is similar to that of the survivalists in Night of the Living Dead, or the military officers in Day.
Beyond Zombie Politics claims that defenders of the UC system are promoting a Zombie Politics; yet this
is difficult to fathom. For they are insistent on saving the University, on
staying alive , even when their version of life has been stripped of
all that makes life worth living , when it is as good as social death.
Shaviro notes that in many scenes in zombie films, our conceptions of protagonist and antagonist are
reversed; in many scenes, human survivors act so repugnantly that we
celebrate their infection or demise .[50] In reality, Zombie Politics are
something to be championed, because they are the politics of a
multitude , an inclusive mass of political subjects, seeking to consume brains . Yet
brains must be seen as a metaphor for what Marx calls the General
Intellect; in his Fragment on Machines, he describes it as the power of knowledge,
objectified.[51] Students and faculty have been alienated from their labor, and, angry and zombie-
like, they seek to destroy the means of their alienation. Yet, for Shaviro, the hardest thing to acknowledge
the living dead are not radically Other so much as they serve to
is that
awaken a passion for otherness and for vertiginous disidentification
that is already latent within our own selves.[52] In other words, we have a
widespread problem with aspiring to be this other, this powerless mass. We seek a clear protagonist, we
cannot avoid associating with those we perceive as still alive. Yet for Baudrillard, this constitutes a
fundamental flaw: "at
the very core of the 'rationality' of our culture, however,
is an exclusion that precedes every other, more radical than the
exclusion of madmen, children or inferior races, an exclusion
preceding all these and serving as their model: the exclusion of the
dead and of death ."[53] In Forget Foucault, we learn the sad reality about biopower: that
power itself is fundamentally based on the separation and alienation
of death from the reality of our existence. If we are to continue to use this
conception, we risk failing to see that our very lives have been turned

into a mechanism for perpetuation of social death: the banal

simulation of existence . Whereas socialized death is a starting point for Foucault, in
Baudrillard and in recent actions from California, we see a return to a reevaluation of society and of death;
a possible return to zombie politics. Baudrillard distinguishes himself as a connoisseur of graffiti; in Forget
Foucault, he quotes a piece that said When Jesus arose from the dead, he became a zombie.[54]
Perhaps the reevaluation of zombie politics will serve as the
messianic shift that blasts open the gates of hell, the cemetery-
university . According to the Berkeley kids, when we move without return to their tired meaning, to
their tired configurations of the material, we are engaging in war.[55] Baudrillards words about
semiotic insurrectionaries might suffice: "They blasted their way out however,
so as to burst into reality like a scream, an interjection, an anti-
discourse, as the waste of all syntatic, poetic and political
development, as the smallest radical element that cannot be caught
by any organized discourse . Invincible due to their own poverty, they resist every
interpretation and every connotation, no longer denoting anyone or
anything ."[56]
This means the affirmative is complicit with the
productive regime of capitalism the accumulation of
knowledges to stave off the collapse of effective
economics. This life bringing project forms the foundation
for all forms of exclusion and ensures endless warfare.
Robinson 12 (Andrew, Political Theorist, Activist Based in the UK and research fellow affiliated to the
Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ), University of Nottingham, Jean Baudrillard: The
Rise of Capitalism & the Exclusion of Death, March 30, http://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk(in-theory-
baudrillard-2)

Symbolic exchange or rather, its suppression plays a central role in the

emergence of capitalism. Baudrillard sees a change happening over time. Regimes
based on symbolic exchange (differences are exchangeable and related) are
replaced by regimes based on equivalence (everything is, or means, the same).
Ceremony gives way to spectacle, immanence to transcendence. Baudrillards view of
capitalism is derived from Marxs analysis of value. Baudrillard accepts Marxs view that capitalism is
based on a general equivalent. Money is the general equivalent because it can be exchanged for any
commodity. In turn, it expresses the value of abstract labour-time. Abstract labour-time is itself an effect of
Capitalism is
the regimenting of processes of life, so that different kinds of labour can be compared.
derived from the autonomisation or separation of economics from
the rest of life. It turns economics into the reality-principle. It is a
kind of sorcery , connected in some way to the disavowed symbolic
level. It subtly shifts the social world from an exchange of death
with the Other to an eternal return of the Same . Capitalism
functions by reducing everything to a regime based on value and the
production of value. To be accepted by capital, something must
contribute value. This creates an immense regime of social exchange. However, this social
exchange has little in common with symbolic exchange. It ultimately depends on the mark of value itself
being unexchangeable. Capital must be endlessly accumulated. States must not collapse. Capitalism thus
introduces the irreversible into social life, by means of accumulation. According to Baudrillard,
capitalism rests on an obsession with the abolition of death .
Capitalism tries to abolish death through accumulation. It tries to ward off
ambivalence (associated with death) through value (associated with life). But this is bound to

fail . General equivalence the basis of capitalism is itself the ever-

presence of death. The more the system runs from death , the more
it places everyone in solitude, facing their own death . Life itself is
fundamentally ambivalent. The attempt to abolish death through
fixed value is itself deathly. Accumulation also spreads to other fields. The idea of progress,
and linear time, comes from the accumulation of time, and of stockpiles of the past. The idea of truth
comes from the accumulation of scientific knowledge. Biology rests on the separation
of living and non-living . According to Baudrillard, such accumulations are now in crisis. For
instance, the accumulation of the past is undermined, because historical objects now have to be concealed
to be preserved otherwise they will be destroyed by excessive consumption. Value is produced from the
residue or remainder of an incomplete symbolic exchange. The repressed, market value, and sign-value all
come from this remainder. To destroy the remainder would be to destroy value. Capitalist exchange is
always based on negotiation, even when it is violent. The symbolic order does not know this kind of
equivalential exchange or calculation. And capitalist extraction is always one-way.
It amounts to a non-reversible aggression in which one act (of
dominating or killing) cannot be returned by the other. It is also this
regime which produces scarcity Baudrillard here endorses Sahlins argument.
Capitalism produces the Freudian death drive, which is actually an effect of the capitalist culture of
death. For Baudrillard, the limit to both Marx and Freud is that they fail to theorise the separation of the
domains they study the economy and the unconscious. It is the separation which grounds their
functioning, which therefore only occurs under the regime of the code. Baudrillard also criticises theories
desire comes into
of desire, including those of Deleuze, Foucault, Freud and Lacan. He believes
existence based on repression. It is an effect of the denial of the
symbolic. Liberated energies always leave a new remainder; they do not escape the basis of the
unconscious in the remainder. Baudrillard argues that indigenous groups do not claim to live naturally or
by their desires they simply claim to live in societies. This social life is an effect of the symbolic.
Baudrillard therefore criticises the view that human liberation can come about through the liberation of
desire. He thinks that such a liberation will keep certain elements of the repression of desire active.
Baudrillard argues that the processes which operate collectively in indigenous groups are repressed into
the unconscious in metropolitan societies. This leads to the autonomy of the psyche as a separate sphere.
It is only after this repression has occurred that a politics of desire becomes conceivable. He professes
broad agreement with the Deleuzian project of unbinding energies from fixed categories and encouraging
flows and intensities. However, he is concerned that capitalism can recuperate such releases of energy,
disconnecting them so they can eventually reconnect to it. Unbinding and drifting are not fatal to
What is
capitalism, because capitalism itself unbinds things, and re-binds things which are unbound.

fatal to it is, rather, reversibility. Capitalism continues to be haunted

by the forces it has repressed . Separation does not destroy the remainder. Quite the
opposite. The remainder continues to exist, and gains power from its
repression. This turns the double or shadow into something unquiet,
vampiric, and threatening. It becomes an image of the forgotten
dead. Anything which reminds us of the repressed aspects excluded
from the subject is experienced as uncanny and threatening . It
becomes the obscene , which is present in excess over the scene of what is imagined. This
is different from theories of lack, such as the Lacanian Real. Baudrillards remainder is an excess rather
than a lack. It is the carrier of the force of symbolic exchange. Modern culture dreams of radical
difference. The reason for this is that it exterminated radical difference by simulating it. The energy of
production, the unconscious, and signification all in fact come from the repressed remainder . Our
culture is dead from having broken the pact with monstrosity, with
radical difference. The West continues to perpetrate genocide on
indigenous groups . But for Baudrillard, it did the same thing to itself first
destroying its own indigenous logics of symbolic exchange . Indigenous
groups have also increasingly lost the symbolic dimension, as modern forms of life have been imported or
imposed. This according to Baudrillard produces chronic confusion and instability. Gift-exchange
is radically subversive of the system. This is not because it is rebellious.
Baudrillard thinks the system can survive defections or exodus. It is because it counterposes
a different principle of sociality to that of the dominant system .
According to Baudrillard, the mediations of capitalism exist so that nobody
has the opportunity to offer a symbolic challenge or an irreversible
gift. They exist to keep the symbolic at bay. The affective charge of
death remains present among the oppressed, but not with the properly symbolic
rhythm of immediate retaliation. The Church and State also exist based on the elimination of symbolic
exchange. Baudrillard is highly critical of Christianity for what he takes to be a cult of suffering, solitude
and death. He sees the Church as central to the destruction of earlier forms of community based on
symbolic exchange. Baudrillard seems to think that earlier forms of the state and capitalism retained
some degree of symbolic exchange, but in an alienated, partially repressed form. For instance, the
imaginary of the social contract was based on the idea of a sacrifice this time of liberty for the common
good. In psychoanalysis, symbolic exchange is displaced onto the relationship to the master-signifier. I
havent seen Baudrillard say it directly, but the impression he gives is that this is a distorted, authoritarian
imitation of the original symbolic exchange. Nonetheless, it retains some of its intensity and energy. Art,
theatre and language have worked to maintain a minimum of ceremonial power. It is the reason older
orders did not suffer the particular malaise of the present. It is easy to read certain passages in Baudrillard
as if he is bemoaning the loss of these kinds of strong significations. This is initially how I read Baudrillards
work. But on closer inspection, this seems to be a misreading. Baudrillard is nostalgic for repression only to
the extent that the repressed continued to carry symbolic force as a referential. He is nostalgic for the
return of symbolic exchange, as an aspect of diffuse, autonomous, dis-alienated social groups. Death
Death plays a central role in Baudrillards theory, and is closely related to symbolic
exchange. According to Baudrillard, what we have lost above all in the transition

to alienated society is the ability to engage in exchanges with

death . Death should not be seen here in purely literal terms .
Baudrillard specifies early on that he does not mean an event affecting a body , but rather, a
form which destroys the determinacy of the subject and of value
which returns things to a state of indeterminacy. Baudrillard certainly discusses
actual deaths, risk-taking, suicide and so on. But he also sees death figuratively, in relation to the
decomposition of existing relations, the death of the self-image or ego, the interchangeability of
processes of life across different categories. For instance, eroticism or sexuality is related to death,
because it leads to fusion and communication between bodies. Sexual reproduction carries shades of
death because one generation replaces another. Baudrillards concept of death is thus quite similar to
Death refers to metamorphosis, reversibility ,
Bakhtins concept of the grotesque.

unexpected mutations, social change, subjective transformation, as

well as physical death. According to Baudrillard, indigenous groups see death
as social, not natural or biological . They see it as an effect of an
adversarial will, which they must absorb . And they mark it with
feasting and rituals. This is a way of preventing death from
becoming an event which does not signify. Such a non-signifying event is absolute
disorder from the standpoint of symbolic exchange. For Baudrillard, the wests idea of a

biological, material death is actually an idealist illusion , ignoring

the sociality of death. Poststructuralists generally maintain that the problems of
the present are rooted in the splitting of life into binary oppositions .
For Baudrillard, the division between life and death is the original,
founding opposition on which the others are founded . After this first
split, a whole series of others have been created, confining
particular groups the mad, prisoners, children, the old, sexual
minorities, women and so on to particular segregated situations.
The definition of the normal human has been narrowed over time. Today, nearly everyone belongs to one
or another marked or deviant category. The original exclusion was of the dead it
is defined as abnormal to be dead. You livies hate us deadies. This
first split and exclusion forms the basis , or archetype, for all the
other splits and exclusions along lines of gender, disability,
species, class, and so on. This discrimination against the dead
brings into being the modern experience of death. Baudrillard suggests that

death as we know it does not exist outside of this separation

between living and dead . The modern view of death is constructed
on the model of the machine and the function. A machine either
functions or it does not. The human body is treated as a machine which
similarly, either functions or does not. For Baudrillard, this misunderstands the nature of life and death.
The modern view of death is also necessitated by the rise of
subjectivity. The subject needs a beginning and an end, so as to be reducible to the story it tells.
This requires an idea of death as an end . It is counterposed to the
immortality of social institutions. In relation to individuals, ideas of religious immortality
is simply an ideological cover for the real exclusion of the dead. But institutions try to remain truly
immortal. Modern systems, especially bureaucracies, no longer know
how to die or how to do anything but keep reproducing
themselves. The internalisation of the idea of the subject or the soul
alienates us from our bodies, voices and so on. It creates a split, as Stirner would
say, between the category of man and the un-man, the real self
irreducible to such categories. It also individualises people, by
destroying their actual connections to others . The symbolic haunts the code as
the threat of its own death. The society of the code works constantly to ward off the danger of irruptions of
The mortal body is actually an effect of the split introduced
the symbolic.

by the foreclosure of death. The split never actually stops

exchanges across the categories. In the case of death, we still
exchange with the dead through our own deaths and our anxiety
about death. We no longer have living, mortal relationships with
objects either. They are reduced to the instrumental . It is as if we
have a transparent veil between us. Symbolic exchange is based on
a game , with game-like rules. When this disappears, laws and the state are
invented to take their place. It is the process of excluding, marking,
or barring which allows concentrated or transcendental power to
come into existence. Through splits, people turn the other into their
imaginary. For instance, westerners invest the Third World with
racist fantasies and revolutionary aspirations; the Third World
invests the west with aspirational fantasies of development . In
separation, the other exists only as an imaginary object. Yet the resultant purity is illusory. For Baudrillard,
any such marking or barring of the other brings the other to the core
of society. We all become dead , or mad, or prisoners, and so on,
through their exclusion. The goal of survival is fundamental to the
birth of power. Social control emerges when the union of the living
 and the dead is shattered, and the dead become prohibited . The
social repression of death grounds the repressive socialisation of
life. People are compelled to survive so as to become useful . For
Baudrillard, capitalisms original relationship to death has historically
been concealed by the system of production, and its ends. It only becomes fully
visible now this system is collapsing, and production is reduced to operation. In modern

societies, death is made invisible, denied, and placed outside

society . For example, elderly people are excluded from society. People no longer
expect their own death . As a result, it becomes unintelligible . It keeps
returning as nature which will not abide by objective laws. It can no longer be absorbed through ritual.
Western society is arranged so death is never done by someone else,
but always attributable to nature. This creates a bureaucratic,
judicial regime of death , of which the concentration camp is the
ultimate symbol . The system now commands that we must not die
at least not in any old way. We may only die if law and medicine
allow it . Hence for instance the spread of health and safety regulations. On the other hand,
murder and violence are legalised, provided they can be re-
converted into economic value. Baudrillard sees this as a regressive
redistribution of death. It is wrested from the circuit of social
exchanges and vested in centralised agencies. For Baudrillard, there is not
a social improvement here. People are effectively being killed, or
left to die, by a process which never treats them as having value . On
the other hand, even when capitalism becomes permissive, inclusive and
tolerant, it still creates an underlying anxiety about being reduced
to the status of an object or a marionette. This appears as a constant fear of being
manipulated. The slave remains within the masters dialectic for as long
as his life or death serves the reproduction of domination .

The alternative is exhaustion 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 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
Guattaris 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
the social organism is subjected to an accelerated
and market globalization,
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: All
the 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
the devastation of the
global agreement on this subject. Today, twenty years later,
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
A
from the surrounding corruption, violence, anxiety)? Is this at all possible in the age of the spasm?
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
They are infinite speeds that blend
appearing and disappearing of which coincide.
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 Guattaris 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 todays
concatenations that offer conscious organisms the possibility of emerging from the present spasmogenic
The rhythm that financial capitalism
framework, the framework of 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 knowledge production of the 1ac has already been

cycled through and processed by the Academy so their aff
is non unique. The debate then becomes a question of
why present the aff in a space of debate. So if we prove
there is any chance of offense to their presentation you
vote neg. Means you can vote neg to vote aff in order to
reject the affs placement within academia, but still
endorse its content.
Vote negative as a strategy to uncover the banal nature
of the university -- the insurrection is here and we refuse
to believe that debate will make the university a better
place. Of course our role as debaters necessarily
implicates us, but that is precisely the pointwe must
occupy spaces like debate to expose the futility of reform.
COC 10, Communiqus from Occupied California. Introduction. Anti-
Capital Projects. 2-15-2010.
http://anticapitalprojects.wordpress.com/2010/02/15/communiques-from-
occupied-california-introduction/
The radical or anti-reformist position within the movement has often
insisted upon a refusal of demands as the rationale for occupation
upon a refusal to negotiate ones departure from the occupied
building on the basis of concessions won. If any winnings are likely to be mooted, in the
long-term, by overwhelming economic forces, then occupation is less potent as leverage for negotiation than as a
practical attempt to remove oneself, to whatever degree possible, from existing regimes of relation: to others and to the
use of space. The occupiers, in this sense, refuse to take what they can get. They
would rather get what they can take. (This is how some fellow travelers in New York,
participants in a series of inspiring occupations last year, have put it). An occupation is not a token
illegalism to be bargained away in exchange for whatever modest
demands the authorities are willing to grant, since this only
legitimates the existing authorities in exchange for whatever
modest demands those authorities are willing to grant. Demands are
always either too small or too large; too rational or too
incoherent. Occupations themselves, however, occur as material
interventions into the space and time of capitalism. They are
attempts to live communism; spread anarchy, as the Tiqqun pamphlet Call (an
influential text for the occupation movement) puts it. This slogan was written on all of the chalkboards during the Nov.
20th occupation of Wheeler. The communiqu and some of the other texts associated with the autumn occupations link up with what is often referred to as the communization current
a species of ultraleftism and insurrectionary anarchism that refuses all talk of a transition to communism, insisting, instead, upon the immediate formation of communes, of zones of activity removed from

exchange, money, compulsory labor, and the impersonal domination of the commodity form. Communism , in this sense, is neither an endpoint nor a
goal but a process . Not a noun but a verb . There is nothing toward
which one transitions, only the transition itself, only a long process
of metabolizing existing goods and capitals and removing them from
the regimes of property and value. Judged in relation to such a project, the occupations of the
fall are modest achievements experiments with a practice that might find a fuller implementation in the future.
There is an exemplary character to the actions they are attempts
to generalize a tactic that is also a strategy, a means that is also an
end. But can the tactics elaborated within the university escape its confines and become generalized in the kinds of
places apartment buildings, factories where they would become part of an extensive process of communization? In a

occupy everything , demand nothing is

sense, the byline of the movement

prospective; it imagines itself as occurring in an insurrectionary

moment which has not yet materialized. This is its strength; its
ability to make an actual, material intervention in the present that
fast-forwards us to an insurrectionary future. Beyond such a
conflagration, there is really no escaping ones reinscription within
a series of reforms and demands , regardless of the stance one
takes. Only by passing into a moment of open insurrection can
demands be truly and finally escaped . The prospective dimension of the earlier positions is
confirmed by the fact that both the Nov. 20th Berkeley occupation and the Santa Cruz Kerr Hall occupation, the successor
occupations, did have a list of demands demands which had a certain tactical logic in developing solidarity, and
expanding the action, but that also suffered from the problems of scale, coherence and achievability that plague the
demand as form. Nonetheless, what happened in both those instances was a massive radicalization of the student body, a
massive escalation, one that was hardly at all countered by its superscription inside this or that call for reform. At Kerr
Hall, the fact that the occupiers asked the administration for this or that concession was superseded, in material practice,
by the fact that they had, for the moment, displaced their partners in negotiation: while they negotiated, they were at the
same time in the Chancellors office, eating his food, and watching videos on his television. They did in fact get what they
could take, and when the moment came, they didnt hesitate to convert the sacrosanct propertythe copy machines and
refrigeratorsinto barricades. VI. We are the Crisis Some writers have concluded that the sweep of the falls events
presents a dialectic between the adventurist action of small groups, and the back-footed, reactive discourse of those
who want to build a mass democratic movement, the final synthesis of which can be found in the mass actions

undertaken by hundreds in November. This seems false to us since, in retrospect, the smaller actions
 resolve into the many facets and eruptions of a singular mass
movement dispersed in time and place. The smaller actions were what it took to build up
to something larger. Again: it is not a question of choosing between these two

sides , nor of synthesizing them , but rather of displacing the

priority of this opposition. The real dialectic is between negation
and experimentation: acts of resistance and refusal which also
enable an exploration of new social relations, new uses of space and
time. These two poles cant be separated out, since the one passes into the other with surprising swiftness.
Without confrontation, experimentation risks collapsing back into
the existing social relations that form their backdrop they risk
becoming mere lifestyle or culture, recuperated as one more
aestheticized museum exhibit of liberal tolerance toward student
radicals. But to the extent that any experiment really attempts to
take control of space and time and social relations, it will necessarily
entail an antagonistic relation to power. This was evident when, during the week before
exams reserved for studying (Dec. 7-11), Berkeley students marched back into Wheeler and held an open, unlocked
occupation of the unused parts of the building, negotiating an informal agreement with the police and administrators,
plastering the walls with slogans, turning classrooms into organizing spaces, study spaces, sleeping spaces, distributing
food and literature in the lobby, and holding meetings, dance parties and movie-screenings in the lecture hall. This
attempt to put the building under student-led control turned out to be too much for the administration, and early in the
morning of Dec. 11, the last day of the occupation, 66 people were arrested without warning as they slept. That same
evening, in response, a group marched on the Chancellors house carrying torches, destroying planters, windows, and
lamps. What was originally conceived as a largely non-confrontational action quickly became highly confrontational. There
is nothing new without a negation of the old. By the same measure, even if the people occupying Wheeler on Nov. 20th
had little time to reinvent their relations, inasmuch as they spent most of their time fighting the cops for control of the
doors, what emerged was a structure of solidarity, of spontaneous, self-organized resistance that obliterated any
distinction between those inside and those outside, and that passed, by way of political determination, through the police
lines meant to enforce this barrier.