friday // 19 october
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bifo on panic war
i want to talk about attention economy and digital labor, and panic and
the
global war. at the end, i want to show that all this has something to do
with
the would-be, with the future self-representation of work. i read in
this
beautiful paper [the make world paper], global processes are running ouf
time
and space. running out of time, global processes are running out of
time. i
start from this sentence.
i would say that globalization is being reframed in these days. and
september 11
has been the showdown of this kind of reframing of globalization. we
come from a
period, a long period, the period of modernity, but also the first
period of, in
brackets, postmodernity, when global control was the general frame,
global
control as a technotopia, and global control as the general politics of
capital.
now i have the impression that we are completely out from that frame,
and we are
entering the frame of global panic.
what is panic? you know that the psychatrists have recently discovered
this kind
of syndrome. it seems that a widespread form of panic, of panic
syndrome, is
something quite recent in the psychological self-perceptions of human
beings.
but what does panic mean? you know that panic used to be a nice word,
like james
hillman remembers. pan is the divinity of nature, of totality. pan is
the
relationship between man and nature.
but inside the capitalist frame, panic becomes something different,
because we
have to be in control. inside the psychological frame, and political
frame and
economic frame of control, panic becomes a pathology, a
psycho-pathology. what
panic is, outside that... we can talk of panic when a conscious
organism,
individual or social organism, has no time to process the information
input. you
see, the organism, all of a sudden, is no more able to process the
amount of
information coming in, and creating a kind of hyper-attention which is
no more
able to process the information. so i have the impression that the real
problem
that semiocapitalism is facing nowadays is the problem of panic.
davenport and beck have published three or five... some months ago, a
book
titled "attention economy". it's a book for managers, so it's not so
interesting. but it's very interesting... the central problem they pose.
they
say, inside the informational work process, we have no more time for
attention.
first, we don't have time for attention inside the work. second, we have
no more
time for affection, for that spatial kind of attention which is erotic
attention, which is attention to the body, to our body, to the body of
other
people. so we find ourselves more and more in a situation where we can
say, we
have run out of time, we have run out of attention. so what happens when
attention... when we have no more time for attention? we are witnessing
this
kind of situation.
collin powell, some days ago, told about the rumors that information
about
bombings and hijackings of airplanes and so on that were situating
before
september 11. he told, yes, it's true, we have received information
about
something like this, we have received information about bombings and so
on. we
had too much of it. this is the problem. we have too much of
information.
so the panic is becoming social panic, and we are entering a phase which
seems
to me the phase of panic war. what are the roots of panic war? in my
opinion, we
have to look at the relationship between cyberspace and cybertime.
cyberspace is
the infinite productivity of general intelligence, of general intellect,
of the
network, when a huge number of thinking points enter in connection. at
the same
time we create an infinte suppy of mental goods, of intellectual goods,
of
information.
but cybertime is not infinite at all. cybertime is the organic, the
physical
ability of processing information which is inside our physical,
emotional,
affective brain. so, you see, all of a sudden, this kind of relationship
between
infinite expansion of cyberspace and limited capability of processing of
the
cybertime becomes the most urgent, the most important problem in the
capitalist
crisis.
financial times, september 6, in a paper titled "information glut",
speaks of a
telecom crash, and explains the telecom crash we all know, the telecom
crash of
the last era, especially in europe, where the telecoms have invested a
lot of
money in umts, which do not exist, which is nothing. so what is this
kind of
telecom crash? financial times explains that the optic fiber posed in
the planet
is used in the figure of two percent, and the capability of the
telephonic
system all over the world is used under three percent.
you know, karl marx spoke of an overproduction crisis. we are facing an
overproduction crisis of mental goods which has absolutely no
relationship with
the past. never we have seen something like this. two percent, three
percent of
the global capacity is used at the moment.
so i see two directions, both leading to the war. the first direction is
the
classical way of capitalism. capitalism brings war like the cloud brings
the
tempest, told an old guy called lenin. yes. we are facing this simple
thing.
overproduction creates the need of a new kind of use of all these
capabilites of
production of these intellectual capacities. this kind of militarizaton
of the
general intellectual is the main danger we are facing nowadays, the
militarization of intellectual capacity.
but at the same time, i see another aspect of the panic war, and this is
the
relationship between complexity, overcomplexity of the actual world, of
the
cyberspace, and the pretention of control, and the pretention of
economic
evaluation. you know, the relationship between the economic law and the
infinite
production, or productivity, of networked intelligence, this is the
problem.
deleuze and guattari talk about chaos, in "qu'est-ce que c'est la
philosophie",
saying that chaos is when the world goes too fast for my brain. this is
the
chaos. so the problem is in the relationship between brain and world,
cybertime
and cyberspace. but the problem is also, first of all, politically...
the
political problem, our problem, is in the rule of this relationship. if
we
pretend to be able, like capitalism wants to do, if we pretend to be
able to
control the infinite productivity of networked intelligence, we go
inside the
panic world.
you know, i have good news for all of us. fundamentalism, the liberist
dictatorship on one side, and its twin, the religious fundamentalism,
deterritorialization and reterritorialization, are launching a suicidal
war.
this is the end. this is the end of liberist dictatorship. you know,
when a
giant is too strong to be beaten by someone, there is only one way to
beat the
giant: to put the strength of the giant against the giant himself. this
is what
they are doing. hallelujah!
it seems that osama bin laden and george bush used to be close friends.
i mean,
the father of osama bin laden and the father of the president george
bush. so
goes the story. and now we have the problem of what has to be done. it's
a
political problem that we are facing, and it's a problem of
self-representation
of mental work, of general intellect. i say that what has to be done...
what has to be done? i would say that we should transform the global war
into a
process of general secession of intellectual, of intelligent work. first
of all,
we have to launch the movement coming from seattle, coming from genoa,
in a new
phase of this global movement. we have to launch this movement against
the
militarization of mental work. but secondly, we have to destroy the rule
of
general connection of the different affective and social strata of
intellectual
work. we have to break the rule and the war. this war, the panic war, is
creating the conditions for a successful job in this direction.
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