Category: theory

call forth its riches

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…write about what your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty. Describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember. If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is no poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison… Rilke

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The city writes itself on its walls and in its streets. But that writing is never completed. The book never ends and contains many blank or torn pages.
Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (1970)
notes – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

The Uprising by Franco “Bifo” Berardi

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The Uprising – On Poetry and Finance by Franco “Bifo” Berardi via SEMIOTEXT(E).

The Uprising is an Autonomist manifesto for today’s precarious times, and a rallying cry in the face of the catastrophic and irreversible crisis that neoliberalism and the financial sphere have established over the globe. In his newest book, Franco “Bifo” Berardi argues that the notion of economic recovery is complete mythology. The coming years will inevitably see new surges of protest and violence, but the old models of resistance no longer apply. Society can either stick with the prescriptions and “rescues” that the economic and financial sectors have demanded at the expense of social happiness, culture, and the public good; or it can formulate an alternative. For Berardi, this alternative lies in understanding the current crisis as something more fundamental than an economic crisis: it is a crisis of the social imagination, and demands a new language by which to address it.

This is a manifesto against the idea of growth, and against the concept of debt, the financial sector’s two primary linguistic means of manipulating society. It is a call for exhaustion, and for resistance to the cult of energy on which today’s economic free-floating market depends. To this end, Berardi introduces an unexpected linguistic political weapon–poetry: poetry as the insolvency of language, as the sensuous birth of meaning and desire, as that which cannot be reduced to information and exchanged like currency. If the protests now stirring about the world are to take shape and direction, then the revolution will be neither peaceful nor violent–it will be linguistic, or will not be at all.

Below, he spoke of the end of the future and the need for better usage of time.

Bifo: After the Future from Preempting Dissent on Vimeo.

Franco “Bifo” Berardi on key concepts in his new book “After the Future”. Directed by Gary Genosko and produced by the Infoscape Centre for the Study of Social Media, Ryerson University.