Short recap of AND: Phenomenology of the End I wrote for some friends (and some quotes)

Note: This was written very quickly and purely from memory. In no way does this come anywhere close to covering the entirety of this amazing book.

There’s a lot to this book, but the main topic is the transformation taking place as a result of digitalization and semiotization of the economy. He describes the new central contradiction in capital as the over-saturated and still expanding cyberspace compared to the limited cybertime. Time is essentially being captured and put into a competitive battlefield by capitalist cyberspace. The exploitation of cybertime is one of the fundamental aspects of semiocapital and the ongoing mutation of the info-sphere and communication. He talks about the acceleration and saturation of cyberspace and our incompatibility with the sphere of communication and inability to understand the double articulation of language, meaning, as a result.

At the end of the book he talks about The End; the end of the world that is. He uses the analogy of indigenous cultures being colonized in the Americas to show the process in effect now that results in The End. Their cultures and methods of communication were rendered incompatible with the Europeans and only what was needed for them was kept (land, labor, farming methods). Anyone who held on to what was rendered incompatible was marginalized. Much like this, although with notable differences, today cybertime is exploited and colonized, and only what is needed by financial capitalism is taken (value), everything else is discarded. The colonization and effective murder of indigenous cultures and ways of communication was the end of a world. Much like this, the end of a world is being brought by our inability to keep up with the velocity at which information is exchanged and our inability to grasp meaning that comes as a result. We are becoming obsolete to the rapid exchange in the info-sphere.

Bifo described another ongoing shift at the center of financial capitalism. The shift from government and human will to governance and automation. The shift from government to governance is a shift from an external power controlling to automatisms being put in place. Governance brings the reduction of language to purely operational and syntactic. “The European crisis” as Bifo describes it exposes a lack of effectiveness in today’s “democracies”, “a chain of automatic implications” put in place by financial capitalism that robs democracy of its content socially. Government is an idea of regulating developing social forces. With the exceedingly fast acceleration of exchange in the info-sphere and vast expansion of economic power brought by financial capitalism, government becomes nothing as it can no longer supervise the social forces. It has become a ritual, a show, ultimately meaningless in the formation of power.

Reality could be described as the point of conjunction of innumerable psycho-cognitive projections. If the mind can process the world as an infinite set of coevolving realities that act on one another, this is only because the mind is in the world. Language is the realm where man brings forth being, and language is the conjunction of artificial fragments (signs) that produce a meaningful whole. But meaning does not take place in a preexisting nature or reality that exists as such, independently, it only occurs in the concatenation of minds

According to a rhizomatic methodology, meaning emerges from a vibration that is singular in its genealogy, and can proliferate and be shared. Meaning is therefore an event, not a necessity — and we can share it with other singularities that enter into vibrational syntony, or sympathy, with our meaningful intentions.

Berardi’s definition of semiocapitalism does something that a lot of other definitions given to contemporary capitalism don’t do: it avoids falling victim to Marx’s commodity fetishism

I call semiocapitalism the present configuration of the relation between language and economy. In this configuration, the production of any kind of goods, whether material or immaterial, can be translated into a combination and recombination of information (algorithms, figured, digital difference)

Machiavelli distinguished the sphere of fortune from the sphere of will. The prince was the person (male) who subdued fortune (female) to rational political will.

Fortune was chaos hiding in the folds of human experience

In order for the prince to govern, he must previously have cut out a narrow string of events in the infinity of fortune. The dark infinity of un-reducible chaos lay at the border of established order. Chaos was noise; order was rhythm.

Chaosmosis is the creation of a new, more complex order (involving both syntony and sympathy) out of a situation of chaos that has emerged as the effect of the spasmodic acceleration of the semio-universe surrounding the organism. Chaos implies an excess of speed in the infosphere in relation to the brain’s capacity of elaborations