through europe

This text is based on a panel talk (together with Nina Power) by Bifo during the event ‘We Have Our Own Concept of Time and Motion’, organised by Auto Italia in collaboration with Federico Campagna, Huw Lemmey, Michael Oswell and Charlie Woolley in August 2011.

 

I beg your pardon for the frantic way of my exposition, but the problem is that the object of my reflections is frantic. We are doing so many things without really understanding what is the framework of our actions. I do not pretend to clarify this framework or our understanding of it; I don’t even pretend to come to some conclusions in this short time. But I will try to say something about the coming problem; the coming collapse; the coming insurrection.

 

 

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.