On poetry and finance (berardi, The Uprising)

Franco “Bifo” Berardi, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) 2012

In this thought provoking collection of essays, Berardi discusses poetry from two related angles. On one hand he aims at drawing a conceptual link between the current articulation of capitalism and language. On the other hand he discusses the potential of poetry, understood as what is excess in language, to undermine and challenge the current domination of finance (and its linguistic articulations).

The backdrops of Berardi’s discussion are a semiotic approach to capitalism (Baudrillard in particular) and analyses that aim at historicizing the production of meaning in relation to “exchange value.” The argument, which was quite current in semiotic discussions in the 1970s and 1980s, treats Marx’s discussion of “value” as pertaining to linguistic meaning, often following Sassure’s signifier/signified model. In capitalism, the production of (semiotic) value is linked to labor time and increasingly detached from its relationship to materiality (often identified with the signified). Language meaning becomes self-referential, as the value of commodities is uncoupled from either use value hence their materiality and is predicated on labor social relations. This process attains its realization in the separation of money from any gold referent (breaking of Betton-Woods agreement in 1972). In parallel, language has lost any form of referentiality becoming more and more self-referential, like finance. Meaning/value is produced in the circulations of signifiers, detached from what Berardi would call “sensuality.” The effects are disembodiment, abstraction, a general loss of “significance”/sense. Exchange dominates.

Berardi links this state of capitalism with the then current crisis of debt – 2008-2012 , nowadays still very relevant but out of public consciousness. He follows Lazzarato and others (Graeber) in identifying debt as the universalizing human condition of the contemporary. He sees the crisis of debt as linked to movements like Occupy and similar protests in Spain, Italy, Greece and elsewhere (he is quite silent about movements outside of Europe United States and keeps a quite euro-centric focus, also in terms of perspectives). Insolvency marks the limit of the logic of debt and reveals the “condition” we all live in. Something parallel is taking place in language. Financial insolvency also highlights the “de-referentialization” of language and general loss of meaning and disembodiment.

Poetry emerges in this landscape as a resignifying practice that breaks the circuit of exchange value (both linguistic and financial) and recuperates sensuality and embodiment. Berardi names poetry the “excess” of language that is endowed with the power to effect such transformation. While he quotes poetry throughout (quite classical modernist references such as Yeats and Rilke—no jump to the contemporary or to forms such as rap), he does not seem to imply that his notion of “poetry” is restricted to a bounded notion of what constitutes a poem.

Berardi’s approach might seem quite “romantic” in endowing poetic language with the power to undo or detour the forces of capitalism at play. However, the essay does not propose a facile binarism (the prose of capitalism versus the poetry of the uprising)  and it is clear that it is not “poetry” in itself that can save the world, but rather a renewed relationship to language, that is to say to the world, new forms of experiencing collectivity and embodiment.

Here Berardi dwells on a vocabulary he has discussed elsewhere to suggest a series of practices and approaches that to him make this appeal to poetry concrete. Most effective is his recognition of the specific qualities that collective assemblages have in the contemporary epoch. Offering a critique of “connectivity” as part of the production of exchange value, he proposes the term “conjunction” as a process of becoming other in which singularities are left to change without merging into a connected or functional whole. Drawing on Deleuze Guattari, but also on Guattari’s Chaosmosis, Berardi develops this idea of conjunction towards a renewed interest for the aesthetic dimension (polysemy, gesture, voice) and hence ultimately for the relationship between language and desire. Irony he concludes, is an interesting linguistic tool to undo the regime of universal exchange and connectivity (quite a situationist conclusion).

While in 2017 one might feel that Berardi does not offer too much beyond an appeal to body and sensation, his renewed vocabulary is certainly interesting to pursue an exploration of poetry as that which is “non-consumable” (Pasolini). What is at stake is less the salvific value of art, or the idea that art can change the world, than a perspective that suggests that art/poetry is a different modality to experience the world. And we definitely need different modalities.