Semiocapitalism Readings

Semiocapitalism – a theory that claims capitalism pervades all forms of existence

Reality is constructed through signs and signifiers
Hyperreality is constitutive of lies – masks the truth with simulation and simulacra
We see pumpkin spice and think pumpkin – then we think pumpkin and think pumpkin spice…
but it’s a lie since pumpkin spice doesn’t have pumpkin in it
Images are reality, images mask reality, images simulate reality but are fake
Berardi (Bifo)
 “Schizo-Economy”
- Capitalist networks were implemented in the 90s
- Semiocapital is capital flux??
- Cognitive activity has always been at the basis of human production
- There is no human labor process that doesn’t require intelligence
- 3 aspects to semiocapitalism
o Critique of the political economy of intelligence
o The semiology of linguistic economic fluxes
o Infospheric environment
- Human minds and flesh integrate with the digital circuit due to acceleration and
combination of bio-info production
o Information is a vital fluid
- Neoliberal culture has forced an idea of competition into our brain
o A psychotic stimulation that accelerates thought to the point of collapse
- The control of communication now exists?
- Flexibility has become fractalization – that’s the fragmentation of time
- Our energies used in the labor process have created the conditions that allows a
collapse of the mind
- The mediascape is the evolving media system – the infosphere is the space of
interaction between the media and the brain
o The mental ecosphere
o Mind – all the receivers – different from digital transmitter
o Cyberspace – network of mechanics and organics
- Acceleration of info exchange produces an effect on the mind
- Transmitters now operate at a super-fast speed – faster than the body or mind
- If you want to survive, you must be competitive, and to be competitive you must be
connected (receive and process data)
 “After the Future”
“The Century that Trusted in the Future” pg 15-19
- The avant garde movement led to Italian Futurism
- Futurism led to imagination and project, forming the adiea of advertising and
propaganda – the idea of a progressive future was a utopian imagination
- Utopian imagination changed to dystopian imagination – a movement ‘No Future’ grew
in the 70s
- Eventually we had the cyberculture movement in the 90s – after 9/11, we had
conceptions of life vs death and knowledge vs war
- The idea of the future is rooted in capitalism and the expansion of knowledge – the idea
that the future will always get better is part of the bourgeois production model
- Future is a psychological perception based on the idea of progress
o Not time
- People are forced to migrate by war, pollution, and famine – racism is embedded in
securitization, and in the ethnic and social conflicts around the world

“Futurism and the Reversal of the Future” pg 19-25

- Futurist Manifesto came with the assembly line of the Industrial Revolution – mass
production was associated with progressive modernity
o Emphasized speed of industrialization
o Futurism was based on the idea of industrialization
o Machine had value – speed, tools, utility
- Political power is part of the machine – the machine is a formulation of automation,
language, and logic
- Sensitivity – human ability to process info – it makes understanding possible, both
empathetic and linguistic
o We’re losing sensitivity
- The ‘No Future’ movement was a changing perception of the future – the Futurists
thought that the future was reliable and trustworthy
- Modernists live time as a progress towards perfection
o Reality and reason changed history into code
- Code and terror changed the future and present and social relation to dystopia instead
of utopia

“City of Panic” pg 93-97

- Panic – form psychopathology – the individual is overwhelmed by the speed of
processes within and around it
- Tech has changed the economic process from producing material goods to producing
semiotic goods – semiocapital becomes the main part of the economy
- We create digital product
 - Semiocapital – the crisis of overproduction – economic and psychopathic (stimulation to
the point of collapse)
- Urban expansion was dictated by economic interest – urban panic is the collision of
these spaces and the info sphere
o The social organism can’t process all this chaos
- The urban libidinal economy – i.e. phones calling each other across urban space and
time
- Securitization paranoia – no time for closeness in the city of urban panic – desire
becomes anxiety

“Exhaustion: Rereading Baudrillard” pg 134-139

- Crisis – exhaustion and breakdown due to famine, pollution, death
- Time is in the mind – the limit to growth is the limit to our mental capacity to extend
time
- Squo – energy is being lost and desire is being absorbed in finance and virtualization by
capitalism
- Hyperrealistic stage of capitalism and instauration (creation) of the logic of simulation
o Collapse of reality into hyperrealism – reproduces the world and duplicates
everything real i.e. through advertising
o In the semiocapitalist idea of hyperreality, the brain is a market
- Simulation is the new plane of consistency of capital growth
- the simulacra in the infosphere has saturated our imaginations – advertising has
‘submitted the energies of the social psyche to permanent mobilization,’ leading to
exhaustion
- End of revolution against power – leads to a new form of action marked by self-
annihilation
o The increase in the power of power increases our will to destroy it – i.e. twin
towers – they were responding to the suicide of the suicide planes with their
own suicides
- Baudrillard  new way of thinking subjectivity – reversing subjectivation that allowed
the 1900s theories, and creating a new theory of subversion, based on exhaustion
o Exhaustion is the inability of the body to escape capitalism – social energies are
deactivated
- Suicide has become a form of political action i.e. Islamic radicals, Indian farmers vs cap,
French workers in factories, etc.
 “Precarious Rhapsody”
“Acceleration, language, and identity” pg 87-89
- The circulation of info that we deal with brings a crisis with it
- Verbal language is replaced by digital communication – sensory feelings are reshaped
- Changes in part of a cognitive function redefine all cognitive function
- The way we store memories depends on identity – identity is shaped by memory
- When there’s too much information, the memory is less remembered, and we begin to
only look at the current info
o The more info, the less memorization
o Briefer exposure to info, less memory depth
- We progressively forget things, so memories are no longer personalized, and instead
homogenized

“The obsession with identity” pg 92-93

- Humanity is obsessed with identity – that’s a crisis for universalism
o Universalism – a normative force beyond differences
o Oppose bourgeois universalism with proletariat particularism
- Internationalism was a fact of collective experience of proletariat workers
- Peoples are particularities – movements led to fascism, as a new type of authoritarian
regime
o Social democracy was key to reformism – capital vs the working class continues
- Revolution and political democracy don’t mean anything – they lack a social foundation
James
“From ‘No Future’ to ‘Delete Yourself (You Have No Chance to Win)’:
Death, Queerness, and the Sound of Neoliberalism
- I read this but didn’t take notes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Semiocapitalism Lecture
James
 Dino
There’s an end the subject tries to achieve – a drive toward the future
Theories of negativity criticize the continual move towards the future – negate the project of
linear time and progress over time
- They interrupt the future – a song (music) has a traditional rhythm, and the no future
method uses cutting and looping to backtrack songs and emphasize anti-futurity
The article by James criticizes theories of negation – they’re only radical in a system of logic
based on futurity
- Theories of negation create interruptions, but the flow is still sustained by a larger
project of futurity
Instead we need no structure - no time, just interruptions

(AT pessimism) Intelligibility DA – negation still presumes a liberal subject, and therefore can
still be identified and co-opted – we need to overthrow all teleological structures to reach
unintelligibility
 Random Overview
- The neoliberal system requires surplus value
- We are nearing the end of modernity as that surplus value is running out
- This can be proven by the fact that while wealth (in terms of like GDP) is going up,
increasing automation and decreasing wages means that there are less jobs and people
with living wages
- While neoliberalism has traditionally extracted this surplus value from those within the
system, now it is reaching outward and incorporating abjection and abject populations
into its regime to utilize its aesthetics and commodify it to produce affective fuel to
create that surplus value
- Oppression occurs because of the multi-racial white supremacist patriarchy
- Neoliberalism utilizes these categories to maintain productivity and police deviant
populations that must “die” so that the others can have“life”
- Neoliberalism biopolitically invests into certain populations over others and these
oppressions don’t occur merely because of one’s identity category
- During Jim Crow black people were oppressed because of their phenotype but it
regulates it based upon one’s background condition
- That’s what creates distinctions between the “resilient” and the “poor” populations, i.e.
Beyonce
- While she is a black woman the system has decided that through her music and
empowerment (such as the halftime show) she has overcome that
- The violence that she faces is fundamentally different than those framed as “welfare
queens”
- One’s perceived pay-off determines the intensity of the violence
- Beyonce’s resilience can be used to sell records and make the civil society look better –
neoliberalism likes that

Super useful – theories of negation are intelligible and get co-opted by neoliberalism
- You need something more radical – base it on bare life (those left to die)
- Death drive – a position of negativity – a radical position that engages in anti-futurism –
reject reproductive futurism
o That theory isn’t sufficient because it’s subversive, but not as radical as bare life

Capitalism is a system of investment, where we marginalize useless people and invest in other
- Theories of negation are specific to one group, i.e. afropess, queerpess
o Berardi says both are marginalized – theories of delete yourself are key to
stopping a flow of continuity
o Instead of the death drive, you become a subject in the margin
o We want to overcrowd the system
Berardi
 General
You know what something is in relation to what it is not i.e. white is determined by what is not
white
Signifiers help us determine the world around us
Simulacrum – similar to the simulation (a representation of the ream), but a representation of
the simulation
- Real, 1 step away is simulation to model the real, 2 steps away is simulacra to model the
simulation
- i.e. a cherry is the real. A picture of a cherry is a symbol for the cherry, a simulation of
the cherry. A painting of the picture of the cherry is a symbol of the picture, a simulacra
of the cherry
Baudrillard says that continual knowledge production is just ridiculous, and different from
reality – we distance ourselves from reality
We become oversaturated with information – we can no longer empathize with others and
decode what they’re saying i.e. their affect – we can’t access the real since we can’t relate to
people
Good vs Deleuze – deterritorialization is a demand by semiocapitalism that reduces our ability
to feel and think
Under cyberculture, the demand for information is infinite – we always continue to produce
more and more knowledge
- The supply of knowledge is finite though – when you force an organism to keep
thinking, we lose feelings and emotion
- Super materialist – people used cocaine in the 60s to keep up with information and the
pace of society
Criticizes economy (the util advantage) – economy is a simulation
In the squo – info expansion is going so fast that we can’t create a memory of the information,
since we’re always processing things instead of gaining a memory
Fascism – in a state of disidentification, the need to identify allows for regimes, due to a lack of
personalization
Collectivization (become a conglomerate and go against the state) – revolt is a conglomeration
to overthrow the system
- The ability to collectivize under semiocapitalism is impossible – the inability to have
empathy and understand the real has destroyed the ability to create a conglomeration
of people
Linear conceptions of time didn’t really exist until the Industrial Revolution – communities were
based on patterns, or a cyclical view of time – the IR led to info, financial, knowledge expansion
as a form of progress towards the future

Cut topical revolution links, and Deleuze, util, kant links

Semiocapitalism has fractalized us

Baudrillard alt – only micropolitical demands can succeed now – we need a force against the
system (contiguous force) i.e. 9/11 was individual actions of terrorists, a contiguous force
Berardi alt – we should be exhausted by the system and let it continue without us – engage in
the exhaustion politic, by creating a contiguous force of withdrawing from the system
 Debate Applications
Scenario analysis, i.e. fiat, is a simulation creating a view of progress
- Its embrace of fiat is what semiocap propels itself on – debaters oversaturating debate
with more and more plans, reproducing the system
- Depression politics and withdrawal in debate is judges voting negative to refuse to be
complicit in the idea of fiat and progress – voting negative is a contiguous force to
engage in politics of oppression
AT Semiocap
 Util
Massumi says the simulacrum is good, and we should just expand it
 Afropess
Barber – idea of connectivity as a way to propel itself towards the future on the debt relation, is
similar to, cyberculture forces us into the future – there is a subject beyond asymmetry who
doesn’t have connectivity and isn’t related, and that’s non being
 Kant
Meditation – combats semiocap, since it is meant to be in the present and focus on mindfulness
– strengthen your practical reasoning
- We’re always moving so fast to produce and do things – our thoughts are focused on
the past and future – you’re never in the future
Amish people – an example of total withdrawal
 Dino Meditation
Dino’s meditation techniques – concentrate on the idea of inhale and exhale – when you get a
train of thought, push it away – recognize when thought is infiltrated to be mindful