Mar+23rd+&+30th

According to Retort, September 11th was their excuse to intensify this expansionist pattern. We know the excuse: In the name of democracy, human rights and to get rid of totalitarian governments or nuclear weapons. We talked about recent cases of NGOs and Human Rights advocates who are corrupt; “Zoe’s Arch” and Bernard Kouchner. Not only Sudan expelled the NGOs –recently Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia kicked out USAID, the DEA and the American Ambassador. An other example besides September 11th linking Spectacle, War and Capital is the “Blackhawk Down” operation in Somalia broadcast live in 1993 by CNN.
 * Last week we saw that in principle, democracies are constituted by individuals that have inalienable rights: The right to be happy, the right to be successful, prosperous, and equal.**
 * For Baudrillard, the entrance of the “Rights of Man” (which were first declared after the French Revolution in 1793 –I think) into politics is directly linked to Spectacle. Why? Because “equality” is a phantom; and because it is a phantom, signs or visible criteria are necessary to measure happiness and equality. This is also the inauguration of the transformation of the citizen into the consumer. Baudrillard also defines Modernity as the struggle of the Middle Class to have access to the signs that are exclusive to the upper class (to overcome the exclusiveness of signs) and to make these signs proliferate and propagate (imitations, copies and counterfeits are challenges to that exclusivity and to social power or the acquisition of social status by way of signs).**
 * We saw that for Retort, September 11th inaugurated a new phase in geo-politics. September 11th crystallizes for them “War, Spectacle and Capital.” This is because after September 11th (defined by Baudrillard as a “spectacular event” more than a terrorist attack –or rather, terrorist attacks are spectacle) an unprecedented movement of American capital in the world took place, accompanied by military intervention. War became politics plunging the world into a “Permanent War.”**
 * For Retort, this “Permanent War” means military expansionism at the service of Empire (An ongoing imperial project by the US –for which Retort provides a genealogy, a pattern and a history).**
 * The US’s is a “Military Humanism” because they claim to “do elsewhere”, acting in defense of humanity, and positing themselves as a “reluctant power.” Their method is “indirect control.” (By way of complicit elites whom they empower)**
 * How is this tied to Capitalism? They introduce in the “liberated” country Neo-Liberal policies (privatization of natural resources); they give contracts to American companies to rebuild and bring in American corporations that create new niche markets and hire cheap labor. (What Naomi Klein called the “Shock Doctrine.”)**
 * Retort is critical of Peace movements because for them,** WAR keeps the liberals outraged enough so that they do not get engaged with what happens when there is peace.

In //Children of Men//: à The //elsewhere// is brought //here//, as the movie is composed of recent images of disaster and war. Cuarón “re-enacts” images of wars and disasters of the 20th century along with images of //OUR actuality//, thereby creating a terrifying future. In other words: The perceived chaos, disorder, fundamentalism //elsewhere// today, comes to the Apocalyptic First World (England). For Crary: **Spectacle is a form of consumption by way of perception, and it radically transforms ATTENTION into something that produces profit**. Attention is linked to memory. Memory is defined as the CREATION OF A NEW PERCEPTION IN THE PRESENT. We perceive something in the present memory PLAYS A ROLE. We talked about **Bergson’s memory cone.** Spectacle for Crary, empoverishes perception: because it becomes standardized. Spectacle is thus, a kind of crisis of perception. And a set of techniques for the management of bodies, affects, the management of attention, to FIX (paralyze) For Crary it is not opposed to Surveillance and he makes a very nice analogy between the TV set and a prison cell (individualized, we are free to chose what we watch… while it is PRE-GIVEN, pre-fabricated). Arguably, Funes’ memory is a movie camera registering events that have the potential to become history. With Funes, we see the symbiosis of memory, event and testimony by way of mechanical reproduction. Funes lacks the analytical skills to extract himself from the memories: he remembers in REAL TIME: and this is why it is impossible to write history. Funes’ non-differential remembrance in real time is similar to the televisual “total flow” because “nothing haunts the mind or leaves after images… structurally memory (remembering) is excluded and so is critical distance.” (Jameson, 1991). Finally, Late Capitalism creates schizophrenia because of this “total flow.” The total flow is made out of an excess of flows in relationship to our capacity to interpret them: too many signs cross too fast; the mind is no longer able to establish or interpret things.
 * After-images (created by spectacle) are the ENTRY of memory into perception. This entry of memory into perception, STANDARIZES PERCEPTION. IMAGINE: we all have the same cone of image-memories stored in our brains. From Canada to Nepal to Australia to Argentina to Sudan. When we want to evoke, say, a childhood memory –we think of a photograph.**
 * So, the question about locating the “After-images” in //Children of Men// was a trick question. After the screening I mentioned the “after-images” in the film are the citations of already-existing images. Because the our memories are permeated by ready-made images –from the media. And yet, for Benjamin: after-images are very powerful because when we create a REAL one, it means the emergence of the new. A new view of the world, of history.**
 * This is one of the aspects that is quite powerful in //Children of Men//: It highlights that with Spectacle, there is no possibility for the creation of the new –without natality, there is no creativity. We are confronted with the repetitivity of spectacle.**
 * The key problem is that Spectacle has provoked the effacement of historical knowledge.**
 * à One of the aspects of //Children of Men// is that it introduces the concept of “natality” as the alternative to the Revolution in bringing the “New”. Revolution brings the new by way of destruction, and natality (for Hannah Arendt: is creation).**

Precarity; it is not only the immigrant workers; or the workers elsewhere; it is us, it is here, precarity characterizes fast food or retail work.
 * D:** Deterritorialization: the movement of capital, which constantly seeks to push its limits away by two complementary movements: one that imposes limits at the interior in order to administer and exploit its own system and another that pushes the limits further, so it can overcome them with the purpose of reconstituting more intensively its basis.

Klein: discarded factory Brands: a post-commodity kind of capitalism based on the capture of values such as individuality, athleticism, wilderness or community. Management of brand identities. (Brands are made in the mind) Brand: bought by the customer; product: made in the factory. This is tied to the knowledge economy and to cognitive or intellectual labor. What are the material aspects of the semio-flows? (the “shorings”) And what kind of subjectivities and social pathologies are created and de/reterritorialized by Capital?
 * Capitalism profits from needs and desire: but also creates needs and desires. What Bifo calls “Semiocapitalism” which comes hand in hand with “cognitive labor” (intellectual labor). What are the material flows that correspond to semiocapitalism, and the social pathologies and subjectivities it creates (and profits from?)**
 * Economic Crisis we are beginning to feel now is based on the** former given promise of a financial system founded on the futurisation of the economy, debt and economic promise **(Credit-based economy)**. The recession means that the promise is over.
 * Brand factories**: hammering out true value: idea, lifestyle, attitude.

Capitalism has become flexible: “casual labor contracts” and “delocalized” production sites to escape the regulations of the WELFARE STATE; using fragmented production apparatus. “flexible accumulation”; fragmentation of the process of production; fragmentation of the working line-assembly of intra-workers relationships (so as to prevent any solidarity amongst them); speed. “Nomadism”Post-fordism implies a “flexible mode of production” which is reflected in “flexible subjectivities” (Neo-liberalism as ideology); The loyalty of managers and intellectual workers is assured not by coercion (discipline) but as soft coercion. Losening of hierarchies; self-management (of the networker); overcoming of bureaucracy; structures that create profit. Work ethics in post-fordism are creative self-fulfillment through each project. The invasion of labor time into leisure time (indistinction between the two); The “networker” or “entrepreneur.” Social networking activity becomes valuable economic exchange. What is Labor? It is the production of value. Many: a new kind of value: “Sign Value”
 * 1. Capitalism and the organization of life and work:**
 * __Taylorism (in Europe)__****: efficiency in the assembly chain: Focus on the maximization of time; in North America, Taylorism was parallel to** Fordism, characterized by a stage of capitalism of mass production and mass consumption, dating from the 1940s to the 1960s. In terms of the production process: efficacy, synchronization, precision and specialization within a company. This came along with __disciplinary subjectivity (Foucault: disciplinary societies; subjection by way of loyalty, a fixed image with which to conform; its social pathology was REPRESSION); then, it__ was quite difficult to distinguish from its incorporation into the new regime. Like today.
 * Post-fordism: time is extricated from the worker; the production process is fragmented and it is fed by precarious labor –which is then recombined in the network machine. The fragmentation of the production process and the precarious nature of labor hinder the creation of solidarities amongst workers. (Fast food and retail); Elimination of the workers’ movement.**
 * Precariousness**: is the core of the current capitalist process inserted in a global network in which labor circulates. Nobody is protected from precariousness; Cognitive labor (I will explain this further) can be broken down, splintered into fragments that can be recomposed in a separate place. This creates a continuous flow… labor is fragmented and can be recomposed; we can’t blame the boss because what the boss or manager does is to supply us with labor time. Labor time is detached from the physical and legal person of the worker. Turned back into slaves; worker not a juridical or social or physical body. How to quantify labor if it has become immaterial and if the boundaries between the time of production and leisure have been blurred?

2. **Sign Value, the Hyperreal** What does it mean that exchange value takes precedence over use-value? And that exchange value creates commodity fetishism? That the USEFULNESS of the commodity is subsumed, subjected, embedded in the exchange-value. This distinction was drawn by Marx. For him, the Use-value is tied to the “physical properties of the commodity”, that is, its MATERIAL USES. How we put it at work, and the human needs it fulfills. In capitalism, however, exchange-value dominates the use-value. Why? Because the “usefulness” of the commodity is measured in terms of money –a “third term” that comes into play between the “use-value” and exchange value. Exchange value is the “worth” of the use-value. For Marx, money hides the commodity’s real (use) value and that is why commodities are fetishized; there are other things at stake in the valorization of commodities (demand based on desire). The more labor it takes to produce a product: the more expensive it is and yet, commodities freeze into them labor-time: but now: efficiency in the production process… lowering of production costs and automatization: the production value (labor is hard to quantify; unlegislated labor: devaluing of labor, outsourcing) –does not match the exchange value. The exchange value: based on offer, demand, the desirability of the good. Immaterial commodities: Lifestyle and branding. We buy signs for “equality,” “happiness” “wellness,” Fulfillment; **(Don Delillo READ)**
 * BAUDRILLARD:** For him, one of the crucial consequences of the bourgeois political revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries was the ideology behind the myth of the Rights of Man: The right to equality and the right to happiness. Happiness “Had to be measurable in terms of signs and objects,” signs that would be evident to the eye in terms of //visible// criteria. And the “phantasmagoria of equality” (The transformation of the citizen into the consumer; of students into consumers); Thus, for Baudrillard, modernity is the struggle of the empowered classes (the middle class) to break through the “exclusiveness of signs.” (Signs of social power and prestige). This initiated the proliferation, expansion of signs for consumption. For example, for Baudrillard imitations, copies and counterfeits challenge the exclusivity of the signs for privilege and social power. This means the creation of a new kind of SIGN which has the power to create identical objects in infinite series… this Sign is present in reproduction, fashion, the media, advertising, information and communication. And this coincides with Spectacle.
 * Value is embedded in the Sign. Immaterial commodities: Lifestyle and branding.**

Why is it ONE sign (VALUE) for Baudrillard? Culture Industry: Uniformization, standarization; (differentiated sameness); “THe stereotyped appropriation of everything, even the inchoate, for the purposes of mechanical reproduction surpasses the rigour and general currency of any ‘real style,’ in the sense in which cultural cognoscenti celebrate the organic pre-capitalist past. Like its counterpart, avant-garde art, the entertainment industry determines its own language, down to its very syntax and vocabulary, by the use of anathema. The constant pressure to produce new effects serves merely as another rule to increase the power of the conventions when any single effect threatens to slip through the net. Every detail is so firmly stamped with sameness that nothing can appear which is not marked at birth, or does not meet with approval at first sight. The producers are experts. The idiom demands an astounding productive power, which it absorbs and squanders. In a diabolical way it has overreached the culturally conservative distinction between genuine and artificial style.” Commodity obsolescence and SPEED; (the cycle of novelty is sped up); Commodities are imbued with speed: they are quickly obsolete (new, more volatile modes of consumption are created). Generalized acceleration of consumption cycles. Financial markets: virtual or fictitious capital (surplus value is created as if by magic) Accumulating signs of physical signs of crisis and decay.

Baudrillard, “Hypermarket and Hypercommodity” The Hypermarkets are hyperspaces where the new sociality is elaborated; it concentrates and rationalizes time, trajectories and practices: an immense movement –to and fro (like commuters). __Sameness, homogeneity; manipulation. Surveillance cameras are “signs”; like billboards. Billboards “police us” like television: It looks at you and you look at yourself within it: Consumption__.” The taboos of consumption are efface by a programmed discipline of tolerance,f acility and hyperreality. “retotalization in a homogeneous space”: Time is dispersed in the functions of the body and of social life (work, leisure, food, hygene, transportation, media, culture); __structure of living as TRAFFIC. Controlled flows of the traffic of signs, goods and people.__ The hypermarket is the expression of lifestyle; Hypermarket and the new university: that deals not with functions or their disintegration but a model of disintegration of functions, disintegration of the city… become “black boxes” multiple input-outpus, convection and destructuration. New objects emerge from this absolute model (neutralization of the territory, power of deterrence; non-funcitonality); simultaneity without past, future; OPERATIONALITY. Hyperreality: the referentials of the model are lost (knowledge, culture); SAMENESS, uniformization of the culture industry and capitalism. Quote by Felix Guattari that sketches out Semiocapitalism.
 * Baudrillard**: Objects are no longer commodities or signs whose message and meaning we can appropriate and decipher; they are tests that interrogate us. “The answer is included in the question.” __Circularity, test, referendum, verification of the code.__

“The routines of daily life, and the banality of the world represented to us by the media, surround us with a reassuring atmosphere in which nothing is any longer of real consequence. “We cover our eyes”; we forbid ourselves to think about the turbulent passage of our times, which swiftly thurst far behind us our familiar past, which effaces ways of being and living… slaps our future into a opaque horizon. We depend on the reassurance that nothing is assured.”

Production of //immaterial goods//: (Semiotic or emotional services); Remember what Aless said: we are constantly producing content, meaning, signs that are captured by the machine and turned into surplus value. David Harvey: “Flexible accumulation regime” Not only fragmentation but the geographical de-centralization of the production process: “Just-in-time” production (you order a laptop online here and a worker in China will start assembling it…). This transnationalization of capital: can be a reaction to social struggles at home; outsourcing of exploitation (nationally: spaces of production are regulated by laws… it is possible to exploit workers elsewhere).

3. Branding Consumer society, Hamilton writes in ‘Persuading Image’, a paper first delivered in 1959, depends on __the manufacturing of desire through design, on an artificial, accelerated obsolescence of image, form and style. In the process (which he assumes, not critically but also not moralistically) the consumer is also ‘manufactured’, designed to the product. ‘Is it__ //__ me? __//__’, he remarks of the commodities in__ //__ $he __//__, miming the ad-man miming the buyer: ‘the appliance is “designed with you in mind”’__ Brands and lifestyle: (Jonathan Ford) Lifestyle brands: bring “freedom”; such brands exist in real time and in multiple places; they are “meaningful” and “purposeful”; they meet “real needs.” To design such needs (cognitive labor); Camper; outdoor wear; []

Lululemon Manifesto: []

Brands: have gone beyond being brands: Nike, Adidas: beyond sportswear; Nike organizing community events in parks and stores; lifestyle image. TARGET: Sells itself as "the fun retailer of discount" and has publicly proclaimed its support for "objects of great design big and small" with its tagline "Design for All." To celebrate the opening of its Brooklyn Store, the bold and progressive retailer ran community initiatives in conjunction with the nearby Brooklyn Museum. On the second Saturday of each month the company hosted fun events from tango dancing classes to festivals celebrating cherry blossom season. Such select events, in addition to a complimentary advertising and promotional campaign, bring to life the true essence of the brand and make brand sense for both the brand and the consumer. [] “Forward-thinking” and “creativity”; social networking used as a way to create new products; “Brand values” selling “Joy, wellness and freedom” to the consumer.

What does it take to build the brand? Sponsorships, packaging, expansion and advertising. Synergies: buying up distribution and retail channels to get their brands to the people. Devaluation of the manufacturing process; the people doing the work of production are likely to be treated like detritus –the stuff left behind. The idea has a certain symmetry: ever since mass production created the need for branding in the first place, its role has slowly been expanding in importance until, more than a century and a half after the Industrial Revolution,: it occurred to the companies THAT THEY COULD REPLACE PRODUCTION ENTIRELY. VALUE: is added by careful research, innovation and marketing. (Production is a tedious, marginal chore). à They close existing factories: shifting to contracted-out, offshore manufacturing. à Global brand owners: are sloughing the responsibility of production onto their __contractors__; (make the thing cheap so there’s lots of money left over for branding.) “Product-free” brand. Cheap-outsourced production structure. “third party manufacturers: Nike and Adidas”; Mass layoffs; reorganizations (tied to disappointing company performance) but rather: Simply savvy shifts in corporate strategy; a “strategic redirection.” Strategy: brand management, marketing and product design as a means to meet the casual clothing wants and needs of consumers. __Shift in attitude toward production is so profound that where a previous era of consumer goods corporations displayed their logos on the façades of their factories, many of today’s brand-based multinationals now maintain that the location of their production operations is a ‘trade secret” to be guarded at all costs.__ __Brand-name multinationals__: Levi’s Nike, Champion, Wal-mart, Reebok, the Gap, IBM, GM: Insist that they are just like any one of us: Bargain hunters in search of the best deal in the global mall. They are picky customers, with specific instructions about made-to-order design, materials, deliver a date and ROCK-bottom prices. (They are not interested in the logistics of prices falling low, building factories, buying machinery and budgeting for labor). Levis’ Jeans made in Mexico in the 1990s: sent to the states to get the label and then imported at 300% the blackmarket (Unbranded) price.

(Part of Annapolis: Turn the West Bank into Free Trade Zones managed by Israel, Japan and the US exploiting Palestinians) Export processing zones: superbrands keep a low profile; names and logos are not splashed on the facades of the factories in their own superstore; Zone of tax-free economy: sealed off from the local government of both town and province –a miniature military state inside a “democracy.” Free-trade zones; ancient times; transportation of goods require multiple holdovers and rest stops; EPZ: the workday is long: 14 hours.. 16… the vast majority of the workers are young women, working for contractors or subcontractors. Wages below subsistence; low-skill. PICKETS OF PURE-INDUSTRY: hide behind a cloack of transcience: the contracts come and go with little notice; the workers are migrants… Instability in the zone; factories are cheaply constructed and tossed together on land that is rented, not owned. EPZ: theory that they will attract foreign investors who, if all goes well, will decide to stay in the country, and the zones segregated assembly lines will turn into lasting development: technology transfers and domestic industries. (Clever trap) the governments of poor countries offer tax breaks, lax regulations and military services willing to crush labor unrest. Zero-risk globalization: Companies ship in the pieces of cloth and computer parts –free of import tax –and the chap, non-union workforce assembles it for them. Then the finished garments or electronics are shipped back out, with no export tax. EPZ: legal and economic brackets; Companies: are economic tourists rather than long-term investors. Cavite: futuristic industrial suburbia.. __INDUSTRIALIZATION IN BRACKETS__. Factories: don’t bring in taxes or create local infrastructures; the goods produced are all exported; Zone wages are so low that workers spend most of their pay on shared dorm rooms and transportation; the rest goes to noodles and fried rice from vendors… Gomorrah, “Angelina Jolie” Naples: roads built not for cars but for trucks, not to move people but clothes, shoes, purses. Towns appear from nowhere; giant metropolis. Officially: these factories don’t exist, and neither do the employees. If the same work were done legally, prices would go up and there’d be no more market –which means the work would disappear from Italy. The businessmen know this logic by heart. Contracting as bidding; There’s usually no rancor or ressenment between factory workers and owners; class conflict here is as soft as a soggy cookie. Often, the owner if a former worker, and he puts in the same hours as his employees, in the same room, the same bench. When he makes a mistake, he pays for it out of his own pocket… no contract, no bureaucracy; __This communal existence acts out the horizontal dream of post-Fordism: workers and managers eat together… high fashion; illegal; contracting; class struggle in both texts.__ 4. The Material Flows (From Thomas L Friedman’s book on Globalization as the “Flattening of the World” __How does Walmart Operate? (Transnational supply chains);__ Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart's great innovation, is that Wal-Mart doesn't make anything. But what they do is draw products from all over the world and get them into stores at incredibly low prices. How do they do that? Through a global __supply chain__ that has been designed down to the last atom of efficiency. So as you take an item off the shelf in New Haven, Connecticut, another of that item will immediately be made of that item in Xianjin, China. So there's perfect knowledge and transparency throughout that supply chain. The citizen in me, hates Wal-Mart, because they only cover some 40 percent of their employees with health care, while Costco, their main competitor, charges a little bit more, but covers over 90 percent of their employees with health care. And when a Wal- Mart employee that doesn't have health care gets sick, what do they do? They go to the emergency ward at general hospital, and you know what happens then. Then we tax- payers pay their health care. And the neighbor in me, is very disturbed about Wal- Mart. Disturbed about stories about how they've discriminated against women, disturbed about stories that they've locked employees into their stores overnight, disturbed about how they pay some of their employees. So when it comes to Wal-Mart, Nayan, I've got multiple identity disorder, because the shareholder and the consumer in me feels one thing, and the citizen and the neighbor in me feel something quite different. (Thomas L. Friedman: “Consumer activism”);
 * Free Trade Zones**: “brands, not products” strategy. //Somebody// has to get down and dirty and make the products the global brands will hang their meaning on. Free Trade Zones.
 * What are the conditions of labor? What kind of factory workers? Sidestepping the costs and responsibilities of employing workers?**
 * Las Vegas** is a Free Zone. “No regulations, no administrative or economic planning. Shoe, clothes and accessories were clandestinely forced onto the international market. The towns didn’t boast of this precious production; the more silently, the more secretly the goods were manufactured, the more successful they were. For years this area produced the best Italian fashion. (Sewing machines, small factories, wrapped packages and shipped goods). Endless repetition of production. No financing, no projects, no internships.
 * Open-Sourcing**: The open-source movement involves thousands of people, worldwide, coming together online to collaborate in writing everything from their own software and operating systems to dictionaries and recipes. Apache, a shareware program for Web server technology, is a prime example. Its collaborators set out to solve a common problem - Web serving - and discovered that collaborating for free in this open-source manner was the best way to assemble the best brains for the task. Apache, which powers about two-thirds of the Web sites in the world, is one of the most successful open-source tools available. Determining that is engineers could no better than this ad-hoc initiative, IBM threw out its own technology and decided to incorporate Apache into its own new Web server product, Websphere. The free software movement is another increasingly popular form of self-organized cooperation, in that it relies on open-source collaboration to help produce the best software possible, for free distribution.
 * Outsourcing**: During the late 1990s the Y2K computer issues became the Y2K crisis! And, India, with all its technies, from all those IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology), private colleges, and computer schools, was the one place in the world with enough software engineers to do it. The initiative became a tremendous flattener. Using fiber-optic-connected workstations, any __service, call center, business support operation, or knowledge work, which could be digitized, could also be outsourced globally to the cheapest, smartest, or most efficient provider__. This discover made Indian IT providers greatly respected, and outsourcing from the US to India exploded.
 * Offshoring**: Beginning in the 1980s, many investors, who knew how to operate in China, began to realize that, though they could not effectively sell many things to that market at the time, they could __use China’s labor pool to make things and sell them abroad__. And so it became that the only way companies could compete was taking advantage of China’s low-cost, high-quality platform. In 2001, China formally joined the WTO, agreeing to adhere to international law and standard business practices. A process has been created in which __countries now scramble to see who can give companies the best subsidies tax breaks, and education incentives, in addition to the cheapest labor__. __This has been great for the consumer.__
 * Supply-Chaining**: When a Wal-Mart cashier scans and item for purchase, a signal is transmitted across the Wal-Mart network to the supplier’s factory (whether in Maine or coastal China). A replacement item is manufactured and then shipped back to the originating Wal-Mart store, via the Wal-Mart supply chain, and the whole cycle starts all over. Wal-Mart’s ability to orchestrate this “symphony” on a global scale - moving 2.3 billion general merchandise cartons annually along its supply chain - is the most telling example of supply-chaining. Supply-chaining, a method of collaborating horizontally among suppliers, retailers, and customers to create value, is both enabled by the world’s flattening and a hugely important flattener in its own right.

“Flexible Personality” comes with a form of “soft” coercion. What are the coercive patterns? The “ideal pattern.” What is the “style of domination”? Harder to define; it is flexible. Different than disciplinary societies, which are “repressive” (Fordism) __(Franco Berardi) Bifo__: Calls it “cognitive capitalism”; a form of production of surplus value that operates at the level of affect. Capitalism operates in the human mind: à It is //semiotic signs// that modify the relations amongst bodies. (“Suffering or terrorist others” –labeled, branded); The POLITICS OF SUBJECTIVATION (linked to Ale’s lecture: We are “subjected” (or imposed an identity but we have the possibility of creating new identities: that is SUBJECTIVATION); how is this possible? Because we integrate into our body the signs that the world gives us; we create a common map of references of signs. We constantly think, re-create this map and the signs. **HOW?**
 * 5. Flexible Subjectivities and “cognitive capitalism”**
 * Semiocapitalism: speed (or the acceleration of production and consumption processes), the overstimulation created by the excess of flows of information creates pathological effects.**

"flexible subjectivity" –beyond the opposition “bourgeois/ working-class”; cultural creation, consumption and flexible identities (desire; free to choose and free to express; encouraged to express) (multitude: is made of these flexible subjectivities); how do we do this? By way of identification with the images of the world that are broadcast by advertising and mass culture. These images transmit the illusion that we could be a VIP: Only if we invested our vital energy, desire, affect, knowledge, intellect, WORK… if we consume the objects and services that are proposed to us. The promise of fulfillment;

World’s inhabitants: are rather hyperactive producers-consumers or trash. Flexible identities: plasticity in the contours of subjectivities; no-identities but the incorporation of new universes and the freedom to hybridize; (no ultimate truth); grace, joy and spontaneity.

Variable relationship to the world mediated through signs; with Neoliberalism: the strategy of SUBJECTIVATION: mirrors what governs the contemporary version of capitalism. Capitalism FEEDS ON SUBJECTIVE FORCES (cultural or cognitive capitalism);
 * à John Heartfield Collages: Appropriation + Juxtaposition of signs;**
 * à Appropriation by the Culture Industry (D)**
 * à Children of men: accumulation, amalgamation of signs. (PROBLEM)**

Bifo’s “Semiocapitalism” (influenced by Baudrillard’s idea of SIGN VALUE); The growing importance of semiological aspects in production. Desire is increasingly linked to work and exploited by it. Totalitarian subjectivity; the working class against the bourgeoisie; 60’s and 70’s: reestructuration: flexibility of the relationship between capital and work: de-localization, de-centralization, horizontal as opposed to vertical relationships; flexibility (I’m on call), precarity. There is no longer the possibility of an opositional, frontal strategy (to topple power; the enemy is visible); Logic of recombination, flexibility, assemblage;

Liberalism (capitalism: de-regulation, privatization) and social, sexual and expressible liberation are interrelated; The influence of counter-culture in the 1960s and 1970s in the mainstream: ideology of liberation and freedm; Ideology of “happiness” (optimistic); wellness; This creates a fracture between __economic need (recession) and spaces of social and cultural freedom: they are dissociated. (Hedonism: signs of equality); Religion poses an alternative: re-introduction of morality and ethics.__ __To have time is to be rich.__

PATHOLOGIES OF THE SOCIAL BODY (Bifo) The Pathologies of “Hyper-expression” The Emotional-capitalist subject projected into the public sphere;
 * The contact between bodies has been replaced by communication; the problem of communication is that functions by way of connections as opposed through “contact.” “To stay in touch” is the mantra of networking and it means to stay connected.**
 * Collapse of traditional models for society: the body has become the site of the battles –where they are being waged. Bifo: how bodies are perceived by each other in the social field. Social proximity. Bifo: reflection and dialogue have dissolved in favor of individualism and solitude: which create anxiety and neurosis.**
 * What are the pathologies of the social bodies within Semiocapitalism?**

Freud’s notions of repression influenced the way in which intellectually, politically and aesthetically, subjectivities tried to break away from totalitarian forms of thinking. For Freud: Civilization is built upon the repression of our instincts or renunciation of them and this creates “cultural frustration.” Thus, for Freud, repression is one of the characteristics of social relations in the 20th century. It was linked to ALIENATION, Marx’s analysis on how capitalism makes that people are estranged from themselves and each other because of capitalist industrial production. Workers lose control of their lives by losing control of the MEANS OF PRODUCTION (Benjamin, Brecht, sounds familiar? The mandate to become PRODUCERS as the political task). Alienation means that workers are not AUTONOMOUS beings; they do not own the means of production (shoe-maker, goldsmith); modern factory production: in the factory production is impersonal; the worker is just a cog. (Image: Chaplin’s //Modern Times//) Alienation: to be overcome by abolishing private property: wealth to be made in common. Alienation and Repression: as catalyzers for social relations (Marx and Freud): Characterizing the 20th century. Freud: repression can be cured through language and anamnesis (remembering, rewriting memory); Marx: repression also can be removed by releasing the productive and desiring energies. (Liberation: taking over the means of production). 1960s and 1970s: Repression was a question and DESIRE acquired political value; (Marcuse); rhetoric of sexual, social and subjective liberation. For Bifo: The end of the 20th century we no longer ask the question of repression (seems to have disappeared): If before Neurosis was produced by the repression of the sexual drives and instincts, today the dominant pathology of our time is schquizophrenic: “Just Do It” logic, mandate. Depression: When you have energy invested on an object, depression happens when you de-invest or substract that energy from the object.** Lululemon Manifesto: [] (Self-fulfillment by way of self-determination, hard work and self-care; the cultivation of the self) A kind of “modern discipline” of seeking opportunities. Bifo says: we need to re-focalize, re-conceptualize the idea of growth; dissolve, entropy, slow down, to work against privatization… commonalization. Life outside biopolitics. Anti-repression, expression and Sign-Value: The motor of capitalist development is desire; and the ideology of domination: the (Just Do It logic): are the new framework of the imaginary. Excess of expressivity. In capitalism: the subject is seduced by the object and thus becomes submissive to it. (The agent is the object); Over-production of semio-capitalism: an infinite excess of signs that circulate in the info-sphere, saturating individual and collective attention. BIfo: “Compulsion to expression” rather than repression: The pathologies of hyper-expression, as differently from repression. Not “concealment” but excess of visibilities: the overload, infro-neural stimuli. For Bifo this is the origin of AHDD, dyslexia and panic. A different way of processing information that creates suffering, uneasiness and marginalization. (NOT A MORAL ISSUE or permissiveness) Expulsion of the suffering self into the public sphere. Semio-pathology: schizophrenia as an excess of the semiotic flows with respect to our capabilities are interpretation; “as the universe starts moving too fast and too many signs are calling our interpretation, the mind is no longer able to distinguish the lines and points that shape things.” CHAOS. Over-inclusion; “In the domain of digital simulation, metaphors and things become less and less distinguishable; thing turns into metaphor and metaphor into things; representation replaces life, and so too life representation. Semiotic flows and commodity circulation juxtapose their codes and become part of the same constellation: “Hyper-reality”. The register of schizophrenia becomes the main mode of interpretation; the system of collective cognition loses its critical competence.
 * Depression; chaos and panic; Chaos creates panic: “It is too much”; for the Human brain: the infinite flow of information makes me panic. Working conditions: exposed to this infinite flow of information and competitive working conditions that create the panic.
 * Speed and competition create panic and the dis-identification… competitive identification: becomes a pathology.**
 * Obsession with “success” and “betterment” and “development” and “economic growth”; (this pathologizes society)**
 * Lululemon (an example of Lifestyle-branding)**
 * Critique of “Desire” as repression or lack; desire as productive (Deleuze and Guattari). Lack is a product determined by economics, religion and psychiatric domination. Repression: as the projection of an unfulfilled desire; but desire as creative; desire constructs traps.**
 * (not as production of subjectivities and new refrains); Capture of desire as its opposite: anti-repressive or expressive view.**