through europe

 

 

A common criticism of contemporary capitalism is that the financial industry has completely decoupled capital from the materiality of production. The crisis in Europe has achieved such epic proportions because the creation of wealth was no longer inextricably linked to the labour of workers in the eurozone but could be amplified by complex algorithms of a computerised speculation. However there has also been a twin decoupling that has taken place alongside the rise of financial industry from the 1980's; a race to the bottom of signification which has seen a wedge driven between signifier and signified. The rise within advertising of a pure aesthetic of connotation which has created a feedback loop that engulfs the entire cultural sphere.

 

 

Preamble: the flood

 

As we witness the fireworks of global finance exploding in the sky, together with the narratives and hopes of the last three decades, we might be missing the silent activity that  swarms around our feet. On the muddy ground of today’s semiotic life, the sudden lack of our attention to the moves of semiocapitalism has not led to any slowing of its processes of transformation of our internal and external environments. Language, affects, emotions, attention and meaning continue to be subsumed by the production system, maybe now more than ever. They are extracted from us in rivers, they are conveyed into the catching areas of Capital, and then stored within the mighty dam of Marketing. There, they are supposed to work by inertia, pushing the engines of economic production with their sheer weight. It used to be called the advertising circle, then it became the totality of semiocapitalism.