Search the archive.

Neuroplasticity describes the ability of human and animal brains to reorganize themselves continuously throughout the lifespan. In addition to the genetic information that is accumulated during evolution to secure the survival of an organism, neuroplasticity serves as a mechanism to cope successfully with ongoing changes of environmental conditions that are not specified by genetic constraints. While prima facie, huge plastic capacities appear desirable, brains require substantial stability to maintain proper functioning. Therefore, neuroplasticity constitutes a trade-off between modifiability and stability. The present chapter, focused on human neuroplasticity, has two parts: first, rules and basic characteristics of neuroplastic changes are introduced; the second part recapitulates milestones and very recent developments and illustrates the current status of neuroplasticity research in humans. Major factors that modify brains and, by that perception, behavior and cognition, are development and aging as well as changes following brain injuries. Other sources imposing plastic changes come from constraints arising under everyday life conditions. Examples are particularities of occupation including life style and prolonged episodes of heavy schedule of sensory stimulation as exemplarily present in blind Braille readers or musicians. While it takes several 10,000 hours of intense practicing to develop musical skills found in professional musicians, short periods of only a few minutes of practicing can induce neuroplastic changes leading to significant gains in perception and behavior. Accordingly, neuroplasticity is not a unitary process, but numerous mechanisms enable the emergence of different forms of plasticity. The recent development of non-invasive imaging techniques allows you study the impact of neuroplasticity in human brains. This approach confirmed previous findings from animal studies and demonstrated that any possible aspect of brain processing and functioning is altered by plastic reorganization. Large reorganizational changes correlate with large perceptual and behavioral gains and vice versa, indicating that interindividual differences of the outcome of plastic changes have a neural substrate in the amount of plastic capabilities. During the last years, a new and fascinating discipline evolved, where neuroscientists successfully design stimulation conditions based on neuroplasticity mechanisms that do not rely on the conventional modification of use, training, and practicing. By targeting defined brain regions, either through sensory or through direct stimulation of the brain from the outside, plasticity can be induced without any explicit task training. Furthermore, the long-held view that external events are required to drive neuroplasticity has been challenged by observations where the induction of plastic changes is possible by mere mental events without the presence of physical stimuli. From a practical side, understanding the conditions that either facilitate or impede the emergence of neuroplastic changes is a prerequisite for a large scale application of neuroplasticity principles in education as well as in intervention and rehabilitation. However, as neuroplasticity is a rather novel discipline, our current knowledge must necessarily be limited, with many facets of brain changes been overseen due to inappropriate technologies and concepts. Extrapolating from our current knowledge, neuroplasticity will almost certainly offer unimaginable ways of interfering with brains leading to implications unforeseen.

Ever since the initial emergence of the capitalist merchant, the productive “waiting period” discussed by Polanyi has undergone dramatic changes. It is now characterized by ceaseless improvements in manufacturing processes and technologically ever more sophisticated efforts to replace human labor. The activities of the “waiting period” are supported by a multitude of social trends and political measures that effectively reduce the price of human labor. Polanyi never shone an analytical spotlight on the inner pro-cesses that occur during this waiting period. For Marx, however, this is the point at which many very different actions for increasing absolute and relative added value are consum-mated. Herein lies the motor of permanent change in productive forces, which he under-stands to be an interconnected economic and societal arrangement.

Digitalization is without question an increasingly dominant part of current develop-ments in productive forces. What makes it new (also in contrast to the precursor phase of “informatization”) is the promise that purchasing (i.e., the acquisition of raw materials and labor), production (i.e., the “waiting period” when value is generated), and sales7 (i.e., the realization of value) all become possible without interruption and without hav-ing to take local, personal, or material realities into account. It is the promise of maxi-mum flexibility and exact calculability. This uncoupling from the constraints of material reality had begun already in Polanyi’s commercial society, but with the new pos-sibilities of digitalization it is taking a giant leap forward.

A first finding concerns the professed normative beliefs of digital elites themselves. Figure 1 shows which normative ideas – operationalized as orders of worth – these elites most often refer to in their public speeches and interviews. It clearly shows that solutionist ideas are a central normative reference point for digital elites. Around a quarter of normative references digital elites make are about the ability of technology to address central problems humanity faces. In addition, normative references that express a faith in the blessings of the market and the value of efficiency are also very common. References to green polity, by contrast, are remarkably absent. This, however, is not entirely surprising. Reminiscent of older discussion on applying knowledge and engineering to managing the environment in the Anthropocene (e.g. Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000: 485), Silicon Valley’s emerging ‘green brand of capitalism’ (Bialy et al., 2022) views ecological problems largely through the normative lens of solutionism. That is, it views them as problems to be solved with technology, rather than through a stronger emphasis on the green polity’s values of sustainability and sufficiency. Overall, these findings chime well not just with what we might expect, but also with other quantitative and qualitative research on tech elites.

[[Figure Omitted]]

The inattention is not surprising. The mention of intellectual property can cause even the brightest eyes to glaze over. It is one of many issues deliberately made to seem abstruse, overly technical, legalistic, and irrelevant for the crises we face. One should not need a law degree to understand the terms upon which their creativity enters the economy. Freeing IP from its legalistic scaffolding, and waking up to its power, reveals that it is a uniquely vulnerable regime.

Here is the vital loophole: crucially, ownership and control of IP always belongs, in the first instance, to the artists, inventors, academics and creators who made it. Currently, this power lies dormant. Most IP producers uncompromisingly surrender their IP to corporations (both for profit and not-for-profit) through employment contracts, click-wrap terms and conditions, and IP licences that allow these institutions free rein to commercialise the IP in exploitative and oppressive supply chains. Others simply give their power away by using Creative Commons or Open-Source licences, but again do nothing to stop corporations from then aggressively and oppressively commercialising IP.

Viewed through this prism, intellectual property law is no different. It creates boundaries that enfranchise certain types of speech at the expense of others. And, in doing so, it enables certain types of legal and illegal dissent, conferring legitimacy on some types of speech through the prism of fair use, but often excluding other types of expression from protection. Drawing on insights both from media and semiotic theory, I argue that intellectual property law tends only to protect appropriative expression that occupies the extreme poles of audience interpretation—works that either adopt, oppose, or completely transform the cultural meaning of an original commodity. Because the law fails to protect appropriative works that fall short of these poles, the marketplace of speech remains locked in a perpetual dance of opposites rather than protecting true expressive diversity. Rather than expanding the marketplace of protected speech, as the First Amendment attempts to do, intellectual property law tends to narrow its boundaries, thereby expanding the boundaries of the prohibited marketplace of speech instead.

This will mean continuing to produce academic scholarship; it will also mean actively pursuing opportunities to circulate our arguments and insights among those in and beyond the legal profession. We may involve ourselves with organizations such as Creative Commons and the Stanford Fair Use Project, for instance, whose work shuttles between law and culture. We may add our voices to pertinent litigation, as in the amicus brief a contingent of media professors filed in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Inc. et al. v. Grokster, Ltd. et al., the landmark peer-to-peer file-sharing case heard before the United States Supreme Court (Liebman, ). Closer to home, we may offer advice to university committees responsible for formulating file sharing and intellectual property policies. It is also worth noting that the National Communication Association lags far behind peer organizations, such as the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, in terms of formulating best practices statements for the use of copyrighted materials in publications and teaching (see Society for Cinema and Media Studies, ; Thompson, ). Should we really defer the matter of how to use popular artifacts in scholarly contexts to the likes of Scholastic and Warner Bros.?

In Harry Potter's world, the wizarding public lives in fear of mentioning the evil Lord Voldemort's name. It is cursed, they believe, and uttering it will hasten the loathsome sorcerer's return to power. In our world, many feel compelled to tread lightly around words and images associated with the name, Harry Potter. It too is cursed, in a way, owing to the strange incantations of intellectual property law and the power it has conferred on the boy wizard's rights holders. Try as we might to convince ourselves otherwise, we Muggles truly are a magical people after all.

In the operaist and autonomist traditions, the general intellect has the potential to act as a revolutionary force, as it is the foundation of economic life, embodied in the skills, knowledge, social relations and general know-how of the working class, or, following the later Negri, “the multitude”. This encompasses not only intellectual activity but also general social relations, which today’s “Human Resources” department might refer to as “soft skills7”. Similarly for the Marx of the Grundrisse, the notion of a general intel- lect is the belief that an understanding of civil society and the development of capital within that society rests on a foundation of its shared history, knowledge and practices. The mid-19th century, writes Marx, is “the epoch which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social (from this standpoint, general) relations8”. As such, the general intellect is a very human-centered view of economic relations and productivity: the capitalist is utterly reliant on the general intellect in order to achieve economic growth and extract profit. But because ultimately the general intellect is so bound up in the human, it retains revolutionary possibilities:

According to Berardi, the primary reason for the contemporary condition of crisis is the change over the last 50 years from industrial capitalism to finance- and semio-capitalism. One of the most crucial events in this regard was Nixon’s 1971 abolition of the gold standard and the Bretton Woods agreement,11 which Berardi describes as actions of dereferencialization, since the value of the dollar lost its connection to a physical reality.12 This may appear as an excessive conclusion, but it nevertheless aligns with other theoreticians in and outside the field, including Marazzi,13 MacKenzie14 and Appadurai.15, as it stresses the performative and immaterial character of finance capitalism. Berardi refers to this self-referential economic paradigm as semio-capitalism, since the primary production is not based on physical things but rather the exchange of semia—signs: “There are no longer material things, but signs; no longer the production of things which are tangible visible materials, but the production of something that is essentially semiotic.”16 Following this argumentation, in the present age of digital semio-capitalism the spheres of production and language would seem to coincide, resulting in the abstraction of work which is increasingly based on cognitive labour and the immaterial exchange of information. These accelerating processes alienate— whom he designates as—‘the cognitive workers’ from their social, perceptive and affective bodies. Furthermore, in his 2015 book AND. Phenomenology of the End - Sensibility and Connective Mutation Berardi states that “the infosphere acts directly on the nervous system of society, affecting the psychosphere and affecting sensibility in particular,”17 emphasizing how the accelerating infosphere, the dimension of intentional signs surrounding the sensitive organism, affects sensibility.18 As stated above, Berardi conceptualizes this sensibility as the surface of contact between the human being and the world; a sensuous, affective and linguistic attentiveness, receptiveness and capacity for interpretation and comprehension crucial for the social organism to interact with itself and the surrounding world.19 However, this sensibility is inhibited by the semio- capitalist rationalization of language, which becomes operational, standardized and thus exchangeable, so to minimize friction in the still accelerating exchange of information and immaterial value.20 For him, this paradigm of semio-capitalism pervades all spheres of human life, and thus inhibits the ability to understand, express, imagine and create different relations and conjunctions— or alternative futures, if you like.

Since the 1980s postoperaist scholars have further developed Debord’s conceptual link between capitalism and the power of images by investigating the connection between the financial deregulation so characteristic of our time and the free-floating proliferation of iconic values and meanings.3 The emergence of the society of the spectacle in conjunction with neoliberalism’s financial system resulted in the rise of semiocapitalism, a term deployed by scholars such as Jean Baudrillard and later Franco Berardi.4 It designates a late stage of capitalism in which information technologies such as digital trading make it possible to merge the productive use of signs and information with capital valorization. In this regard, economies that capitalize on our attentive time – for instance TV series, social media, online games, advertising, etc. – which are framed as lifestyles and consumer preferences, have partially replaced the production of goods. Producing ideas in the form of visual signs and making people pay for them with their attentive time is the main way to grow profit in the “attention economy,” which leads to what Bernard Stiegler has termed “hyperattention,” an inevitable over-exploitation of that time. Hyperattention is understood as the current way put in place in accumulating capital.5 Stiegler describes a historical moment that is characteristic for a global simultaneity of events and attitudes. This was identified by Peter Osborne as the “contemporary,” a designation not only of the art of our time in which “the apparent closure of the historical horizon of the avant-garde” took place, but also a different understanding of temporality, sensed as a state of perpetual presentness.6

Is it only in the contemporary era, as described by Debord, that images have become synonymous with the valorization of time (the classical notion of capital), or have they always been essential to economy’s foundational principles? And if images are capital, as Debord maintains, how does this thesis relate to the historical a priori that grounds the knowledge/power regimes which construct contemporary viewers and capitalist consumers? When Debord criticizes his epoch, does he not look back and fantasize about a novel avant-garde which is characterized by radical aesthetic ruptures with the past, and the initial unacceptability of its art to the public? What is the relation of classical or historical avant-gardes to the values of contemporary art? Also, how do they both relate to the valorization of images that sustains the spectacle of late capitalism, so gloriously projected in the global art of our time? And in what ways does this spectacle relate to the premodern predecessors of knowledge/power regimes?

The mechanisation and technicisation of human lives are mirrored in the fact that free time is spent in the mechanical flux of news – today augmented by the semiotic fluxes of capital (from advertising to social media) – and where everything presented as ‘new’ is, in fact, a zombified repetition of the same. Vision, visuality and imagination in the contemporary condition are codified by the logic of the return of the same. As an insurrection occurring in time and place, Trocchi believed that sigma could only insert itself into the capillaries of repeated uncreative time, in the undergrounds of the urban centres and in such a way that it would change time and space from within. This is the reason why sigma could not be a revolutionary, momentous change in time-space – an event that dies immediately as it comes into existence. This is also why it could not occur democratically as a movement of forces through existing space-time: the democratic choice does not exist yet because it cannot be imagined and visualised yet. sigma is not a coup d’etat, in the manner in which Lenin and Trotsky understood it. It is rather a coup de monde, ‘more gradual, less spectacular’ – an eminently cultural virology, which begins by intelligence becoming self-conscious. Trocchi appears to believe in a kind of dialectic of historical violence, where ‘revolution follows repression and is followed by repression’ (GEN: 2). Thus instead of arguing for a revolutionary coup d’etat that would be swiftly and violently repressed, Trocchi envisioned an invisible insurrection fuelled by ‘the powerhouse of the mind’ (INV: 1). The enemy, writes Trocchi, is never personal: the real enemy is ‘spiritual ignorance breeding fear, hysteria, schizophrenia’ (GEN: 2). As the state is ultimately comprised of individuals, it is simply ignorance against what one must operate upon. Even war and violence exerted by the state appears to originate in thought. Therefore, the change in the consciousness of individuals is all that is required for a sigmatic rupture of the world.5 ‘What must occur . . . is a revelation’, which includes the perception of ‘the forces that are at work in the world’; then, calmly, without indignation, by a kind of mental ju-jitsu that is ours by virtue of intelligence, of modifying, correcting, polluting, deflecting, corrupting, eroding, outflanking . . . inspiring what we might call the invisible insurrection. (INV: 2) The metaphor of the ‘mental ju-jitsu’ here is borrowed from the Japanese martial arts: it is the art of defeating an armed opponent without the use of a weapon. It suggests hard work, self-discipline and a vigorous mind taking hold of itself, understanding its relation to the forces influencing the world – but also performing a creative and imaginative leap of faith that seems to be based on nothing but itself. A mental ju-jitsu is not a figure of aggression, though it is a figure of combat. It suggests the idea of a sigmatic insurrection taking place without aggressive weapons and only through the superiority of mental discipline. And, just like in the case of ju-jitsu, the awakening of these mental forces is available to everybody. The trick here is to give oneself time: the time freed by the gesture of rupturing fluxes of (fake) news or the time to see oneself as part of the nexus of social relations or even the time of a spiritual voyage, which may or may not be induced by drugs. sigma is precisely the opening of time when time only promises to come to an end.

On a larger scale, manufacturing has been exported from the First World to the Third World for the same reason: to maintain the rate of profit. Yes, it is much cheaper to manufacture goods in the low-wage regions of the Third World, but those cost savings are rarely passed on to the consumer. More usually, they¶ are passed directly to the company directors and shareholders in the form of dividends and an enhanced capitalization of their stock. The tendency towards a falling rate of profit is a continually recurring 'crisis' for capitalism, but not one it has any interest in overcoming. In fact, it is the principal motor powering the system, giving it its restless energy (Buchanan 1998, 110).¶ So, what is the revolutionary path? What is the solution? Deleuze and Guattari outlined three tasks - one negative and two positive - that will better position us to become revolutionaries in relation to neoliberalism. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the very first task is a negative one; it is to destroy, destroy. The task of schizoanalysis goes by way of destruction - a whole scouring of the unconscious, a complete curettage (AO 342/371). The object that is to be destroyed is the Oedipus, and to do so, we must neither retreat to a pre-Oedipal phase nor project a post-Oedipal phase as a means of escaping the Oedipal trap. We must rediscover the operation of desire - a desiring-production that lies hidden behind and beneath Oedipal representations. Destruction is essentially a practical matter of undoing the complex set of illusions such as political and national territories by means of which we give structure and purpose to our lives. It is to deterritorialize them (Buchanan 1998, 117). This includes the task of eliminating reterritorialization, as it is constantly a threat (120). This is why the second task is a positive one; it consists of discovering in a subject the nature, the formation, or the functioning of his desiring-machines, independently of any interpretations.¶ What are your desiring-machines, what do you put into these machines, what is the output, how does it work, what are your nonhuman sexes?' (AO 354/384). In order to reach the point of being able to answer these questions, the investigation must push beyond the interpretative realm - the realm in which the question¶ 'what does it mean?' still applies - into what Deleuze and Guattari specify as the functional or machinic realm (Buchanan 1998, 121). Finally, the third task is also a positive one for schizoanalysis; it consists of reaching the investments of unconscious desire of the social field, insofar as they are differentiated from the preconscious investments of interest, and insofar as they are not merely capable of counteracting them, but also of coexisting with them in opposite modes (AO 383/419) (Buchanan 1998, 123). It goes without saying that the answer to this question becomes more apparent in Deleuze and Guattaris last major collaborative work, What Is Philosophy? In this text, we are called to maintain the revolutionary potential of philosophy as a discipline that involves the creation of new concepts (Deleuze 1988, 16). In What Is Philosophy?, philosophy is a critique of the present and with the aim of calling for a future form, for a new earth and people that do not yet exist' (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 108).

While similarly drawing on (both to embrace and move beyond) the work of Antonio Negri as well as the radical thought of others in the 1960s and 1970s Italian Workerist (Operaismo), Autonomist and Compositionist movements, Franco “Bifo” Berardi resists a rhetoric of productivism and questions the political potency of the concept of the multitude. In both The Soul at Work and After the Future, Berardi explores the affectual effects of post-Fordist modes of production and communication (SemioCapitalism) on our individual and social psyches. In doing so he not only diagnoses the toxic effects of neoliberalism, but also elaborates a politics and poetics of the refusal of work. The unproductivity on offer by Berardi exposes the affectual and ethical issues raised when we remain within the logic of productivism, even that which claims a revolutionary and counter-imperial stance. According to Berardi (2009: 21), SemioCapitalism “takes the mind, language and creativity as its primary tools for the production of value”. Under SemioCapitalism the soul is not left out of work, but rather becomes the very mode of production and thus the tool of its own estrangement. Hence, while the resistance to alienation through the reassertion of the importance of one’s mind and soul was at the heart of organizing workers on the factory floor, under post-Fordism acts of resistance must take on a different character. The goal of autonomy or what Berardi rewrites as out-onomy becomes not how to overcome alienation, but rather how to increase the estrangement between the soul and capitalist labour relations. As Berardi notes:¶ The working class is no longer conceived as a passive object of alienation, but instead as the active subject of a refusal capable of building a community starting out from its estrangement from the interests of capitalistic society … Alienation is then considered not as the loss of human authenticity, but as estrangement from capitalistic interest, and therefore as a necessary condition for the construction—in a space estranged from and hostile to labor relations—of an ultimately human relationship.(Berardi, 2009: 23)¶ To become increasingly estranged from labour relations involves for Berardi a multistep process: first, we must understand the way in which SemioCapitalism has redefined value; second, we must identify the affectual effects of SemioCapitalism on our individual and social psyches (effects that Berardi names as exhaustion and depression in After the Future and the panic-depression cycle in The Soul at Work); and third we must engage Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis as a political therapy that helps us to reorient the field of desire and thus reframes the concept of wealth, re-engaging us in authentic human relationships. Each of these steps happens not through reasserting our productive capacity, but rather through refusing to participate in the systems of production on offer by SemioCapitalism’s labour relations.¶ Under SemioCapitalism value has been divorced from all referent points. When Richard Nixon cancelled the direct convertibility of the US dollar to gold the referential logic of value was discarded in favour of what Berardi (2009: 148) calls “generalized indeterminacy”. From a radical theological point of view a sense of generalized indeterminacy may sound ideal in that, like radical theology, it denies a determinate telos. It might resonate, for instance, with Robbins’s call for a radical democratic resistance to all forms of hegemony that will come by way of an immanent exodus, one that, Robbins notes quoting Negri, is an “exodus from obedience, that is to say, from participation in measure, i.e., as the opening to the immeasurable” (Robbins, 2013: 191). Or it might resonate with the indefinite or infinite eschatology proposed by Crockett (2011: 102). Yet as Berardi notes, the indeterminacy of value and the process of economic deregulation brought on by SemioCapitalism did not result in anarchic freedom. It remains tamed and obedient to a certain eschatological vision: “Deregulation does not mean that society is freed from all rules, not at all: it is instead the imposition of monetary rule on all domains of human action. And monetary rules are in fact the sign of a relationship based on power, violence and military abuse” (Berardi, 2009: 148). In other words, as Philip Goodchild (2009: 188) has noted, neoliberal deregulation has trapped us in the eschatological shadow of money, within which spending time is subordinated to saving it. While this eschatological promise may be indeterminate because money no longer refers to a stable referent, it serves not as a source of freedom, but rather as one of entrapment. To counter this mode of violent entrapment Berardi (2009: 140) redefines wealth as time (or in Goodchild’s framing, spending time): “time for pleasure and enjoyment”, which includes time to travel, learn and make love. This wealthy time is not a time that asks, “What have you done for me lately?” Rather it is unproductive time, it is a time to be lazy, to be pleasured, to just be. It is not discipleship in action; it is not worth in productivity; it is not a man who is a worker or nothing at all; rather, it is a soul who is wealthy because she is much more and much less than her labour. To be sure, there is political work to be done to democratize the availability of this wealth of time,6 but by reorienting wealth and worth away from work, indeed in finding it in the refusal of work, Berardi rejects hegemonic structures of value.¶ Both SemioCapitalism’s rejection of wealth as time and its degradation of unproductive time lead to a mental and soulful breakdown in individual and social psyches. Berardi diagnoses this breakdown as a panic-depressive cycle (Berardi, 2009) and exhaustion and depression (Berardi, 2011). Acknowledging Baudrillard’s prescience, Berardi (2009: 179) further notes that “The dominant pathology of the future will not be produced by repression, but instead by the injunction to express, which will become a generalized obligation”. The constant demands to be expressive and productive combined with the overwhelming flow of information and signs without stable referents lead to panic, which eventually leads to depression. Elsewhere, Berardi (2011: 135–138) marks the panic-depression cycle with Baudrillard’s concept of exhaustion. Exhaustion sets in because, “In semiocapitalist hyperreality, the brain is the market. And the brain is not limitless, the brain cannot accelerate indefinitely” (Berardi, 2011: 136). Rather than, or perhaps as both counter and supplement to, an emphasis on the plasticity of the brain (an emphasis embraced by followers of Catherine Malabou),Footnote4 Berardi asks us to look to the limits of the brain—to our exhaustion—for the rethinking of how we might come to be differently.

The US Supreme Court in both Golan v. Holder and Eldred v. Ashcroft held ‘the “traditional contours” of copyright protection, i.e. the “idea/expression dichotomy” and the “fair use” defense … are recognized in our jurisprudence as “built-in First Amendment accommodations” ’. In particular, the fair use defense as codified in 17 U.S.C. § 107 ‘allows the public to use not only facts and ideas contained in a copyrighted work, but also [the author’s] expression itself in certain circumstances’. It is unsurprising that in the context of a robust free speech culture emboldened by the First Amendment, US courts have interpreted the notion of transformative use liberally—and consequentially the fair use defense—when the freedom of speech would be unduly constrained by enforcement of the rights of copyright or trademark owners. One of the most significant contributions semiotics can bring to copyright law is in the analysis of fair use. In copyright fair use, the pertinent inquiry is whether the secondary work ‘adds something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the first with new expression, meaning, or message’. Brian Holland postulates that ‘the prevailing conception of transformativeness [in copyright fair use] is one of romantic authorship, evidenced by a defendant’s authorial purpose or activity’ and proposes an approach ‘grounded in social semiotic theory [that] attempts to account for the multiple and divergent meanings created as various interpretive communities engage a particular work’. However, contrary to Holland’s observations that the US courts currently focus on the degree to which a defendant has engaged in authorial activity in the fair use analysis, the current approach of the US Second and Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals appear to accommodate the shifting of the transformativeness inquiry from locating an authorial presence or authorial activity, to one of reader interpretation, i.e. whether one might reasonably perceive the creation of ‘new information, new aesthetics, new insights and understandings’. As Laura Heymann points out, ultimately, the question is whether the resulting work ‘is transformative in its meaning—that is, whether the reader perceives the second copy as signifying something different from the first’. Potentially when one analyses a work of copyright, one can read it semiotically as embodying a unity of modern cultural meanings capable of being opposed or resisted (through ‘countercultural’ means such as parody), or one can regard it as possessing polysemous qualities which may be contested or disrupted (through ‘subcultural’ practice such as bricolage or pastiche). A countercultural or counterpublic agenda may be best communicated to mainstream society through the use of widely recognized semiotic signs to which the public have ascribed particular representative values or characteristics. Parodies, fan fiction, and appropriation art are the best examples of trans-coding practices where an irreverent portrayal of an iconic literary, dramatic, musical, or artistic work has recoded its semiotic meanings to express a different or counter-viewpoint creating new insights and understandings, thus rendering the secondary use ‘transformative’ in nature. Rebecca Tushnet explains that ‘[t]ransformativeness in fanworks takes many forms, from critique to celebration to reworking a text so that it better addresses the concerns of a specific audience’. Courts may find ‘a legitimate transformation exists when the new work makes overt that which was present in the original text covertly … transformative fair uses make subtext text’. The use of semiotics to discern a different ‘purpose or character’ a recoded or subverted sign offers is undoubtedly valuable to the transformative use inquiry in copyright fair use. Research materials for the study of works of copyright as culturally coded signs may be found in scholarly literature published in the fields of cultural studies, media studies, film studies, and fine art critical studies.

To be sure, many consumers do extend their care for other consumers beyond their family members. They often form brand communities (Muniz and O’Guinn, 2001), subcultures of consumption “ (Schouten and McAlexander, 1995) or “tribes” (e.g. Cova, Kozinets and Shankar, 2007; Cova and White, 2010) that sustain a certain extent of sociality and help them cultivate ties on the basis of shared interests in brands, products, leisure activities and consumption practices. Sometimes they also mobilise themselves against powerful actors to reclaim a sense of agency and control over their environment (e.g. anti-Starbucks communities; Thompson and Arsel, 2004). Not surprisingly then, some have suggested (e.g. Streeck, 2012) that commercialisation has created opportunities and apparently quite attractive ones, for a new type of what Simmel called Vergesellschaftung or “sociation” – i.e. a way for individuals to link up to others and thereby help define their place in the world.¶ Yet the idea of market-mediated communities or communities of consumption is in many ways inadequate. To begin with, such communities are more often than not ephemeral, loosely connected and rather superficial. Steve Miles (2010), for instance, talks of “complicit communality”, referring to the observation that we as consumers are complicit in partly reviving a bygone community ethos in commoditised spaces that we know are not communal enough. That is, we are habituated into the comforts and pleasures offered by consumer[…]”¶ “infrastructures that are really needed for radically enlarging our commons and making them more genuinely caring: from community libraries and libraries of things to shared urban spaces, parks, local arts centres, as well as for more democratic ways of local governance (e.g. radical municipalism; The Care Collective, 2020).¶ Importantly, such communities also stubbornly remain organised around common (consumer) identities and interests. In doing so, they run the risk of building upon logics of individualism rather than collectivism: consumers continue to exist within them as individuals not as part of collectives that can be (and do) bigger than the sum of their parts (Gilbert, 2013). Their underlying ideologies of care foreground notions of proximity and sameness. Conspicuously absent are more radical ways of caring for one another that extend across difference and beyond the market. A good example here would be the various welcome centres that were formed in response to the European refugee crisis. City Plaza, for instance, was a hotel in the centre of Athens, Greece, that was squatted between April 2016 and July 2019. It became home to a shifting mix of about 400, mostly Syrian refugees (but also Eritreans, Ghanaians, Iranians, Somalis) and many European “solidarians[…]”¶ “. As a community project, it proceeded through collective cooking initiatives, shared cleaning and maintenance rotas, participation in gifting and solidarity bazaars. Such practices had in common was their embrace of anti- and non-market values of collaboration, sharing, mutuality and co-production; and ideologies of care that stretched beyond individualism and notions of “people like us”.

The autonomists, most notably Negri31 and Virno32, were the first to recognize the centrality of the general intellect to capitalist production and also the first to see this as a kind of commons, a collective wealth which is created by all and shared by all. Marazzi writes that “The common is the entire knowledge, understandings, informa- tion, images, affects and social relations that are strategically subject to the production of goods33”. Similarly, Raunig observes that “The ambivalence of the General Intellect consists in that it has become a reality, to a certain extent, in post-Fordism, yet not simply as control of the many over their working and living conditions, but rather also as a volorization of cooperation and even of thinking.34” The easy availability of communication technology has rapidly led to our current situation, one in which the thoughts, ideas, knowledge and social relations of our society now have the potential to be freely shared by all, creating a rich commons of knowledge. Yet this within this transformation lies a cruel paradox: as more and more human knowledge and activity migrates online, our shared general intellect, less and less of it can be found outside of the digital world. While it is clear that there still exist many spheres of economic and social relations which will always be able to resist being subsumed within the digital, the trend is clear. This signals a seismic shift towards a homogeneous and universal pool of information, one at risk of new forms of restriction and enclosure, akin to other forms of commons found in earlier periods of our history.

Bifo’s recent book AND: Phenomenology of the End deals with processes of subjectivation which, through communication, information technology, and the government of signs, determine our modes of life and affect the political conjuncture. His central argument emerges from describing the transition from a world in which the relation between bodies and signs was processed through sensitivity (a conjunctional concatenation) to a regime in which we only operate with already codified signs, and with combinations that have already been pre-established by a prior compatibility (connective concatenation). This transformation follows the recent virtual revolution in semiocapitalism, in which capital is valorized through the production of signs, that is due both to a technological transformation and an ontological rupture. This transformation and ontological rupture consist of the sign’s aspiration of autonomy in relation to its referent (in language, the link between the signifier/signified, and in finances the link between money/labor). In other words the human animal suffers the consequences of their actions over the environment – the infosphere which is populated with information flows which circulate at a vertiginous speed – that they have irreversibly modified and to which now they only aspire to adapt. The infinite emission of information becomes incompatible with the capacity of the individual and social brain to receive/metabolize, it becomes impossible for the human brain. This transformation of the environment is thus inseparable from an anthropological mutation that the author describes both from the perspective of new technological patterns and from that of the new power of finance and the pathologies that subjects suffer. The digital revolution disrupts the way in which the body is connected to signs, to the detriment of sensitivity, (tactile) sensoriality, and sensuality (pleasure-pain). That is, the loss of all the components that produce empathy. General desensitization neutralizes the critical power of culture and annuls the availability of the necessary time for erotic bonds, without which there is neither individual happiness nor the capacity to articulate counterpowers. This regeneration of sensitivity – in parallel to the loss of the sense of history – is not, however, for Bifo the effect of technological development on its own, but rather the conditions established by large capitalist corporations for this development.

The main focus of accelerationism should be shifted from the act of acceleration itself to ‘what is accelerated’, because if acceleration coincides with the dissipative or energetic economy of the organism, then it is simply a restricted project. Why? Because what is accelerated is the very economical form of binding which is determined by the exorbitant source of energy but is unsuccessfully adopted by the organism as an affordable yet traumatic consumptive solution that inscribes circuitous paths for dissipating into that exorbitant index of exteriority (whether it is the exorbitant truth of extinction or the sun). As Freud argues, dissipative regression into the exorbitant or traumatizing bedrock of the originary is numerically monistic and functionally exclusivist by nature. The conservative organism does not have any choice regarding binding or not binding the exorbitant source of energy since the binding is unilaterally imposed by the exorbitant index of exteriority. However, the way binding is effectuated corresponds to the conservative economy of the organism according to which the exorbitant index of exteriority must be afforded by the organism in order to circuitously transform the unbindable excess into conservable yet dissipative – at an accelerative rate – energetic spaces (umwegen). Accordingly, the exorbitant exteriority (extinction, sun, …) is inexorably bound but only in a way that is affordable by and for the organism. This is why the organism is inherently vulnerable to traumas: Traumatic binding of the exorbitant exteriority is not as much an ‘unsuccessful binding’ because it is energetically unbindable as it is unsuccessful because such an index of exorbitant energy should be economically afforded by the organism and correspond to the consumptive-dissipative rate dictated by the organic economy. Therefore, although the exorbitant index of exteriority is bound, this binding never naturally happens outside of the economical correlation with the organism. The aim of all life is death but dying (binding death) happens only in a way that the interiorized expression of life can afford. This affordable way of dying registers itself as an economical correlation between the organism and the exorbitant index of exteriority. And it is this economical correlation that manifests itself as the dissipative rate of the organism. Since this economical binding or affordable correlation is energetically dissipative, it tends to generate new energetic spaces, that is to say, it moves toward emergentic processes and increasing complexification on semi-stable, local and transient levels. Landian accelerationism – especially by adhering to an escalated technocapitalism – seeks to intensify this dissipative rate that simultaneously coincides with an intelligenic complexification and the dissolution of organic conservatism on behalf of an exorbitant index of exteriority (viz. capitalism as an off-planet or planet-consuming event). However, as argued, the dissipative rate is energetically conceived as an economical (and hence, restricted) correlation; its existence is dictated by the exorbitant index of exteriority but its modi operandi are conditioned by the affordability of the interiorized horizon of the organism.

“Let’s begin with the motif of territorialising. As previously noted, Army of the Dead frames its Alpha zombies within a quasi-Hobbesian state of nature. This is, obviously, not simply an anthropological projection of what happens when the human form gives in to violent lawlessness and cannibalistic aggression; any more than Hobbes’ account of the state of nature in the seventeenth century was. In fact, the very persuasiveness of Hobbes’ argument of the need for societal agreement is rooted in slippages between metaphors, analogies and experienced reality. This is no better illustrated than when what was effectively a thought experiment coincided with European expansion into the ‘New World’, where colonists encountered ‘natives’ who appeared, largely due to their ignorance of European farming methods, to be enacting the very state Hobbes had described. In this way, and to different ends, both Hobbes and Zach Snyder have assembled a set of relations in order to pull together contemporary anxieties of violence and the loss of culture with universalistic concerns around reason, intellect and right. Both find their experiments in pre- and post-society reified within broader narratives, whether this be European colonial conquest or vigilante riots.¶ The difference is “that in Hobbes’ time the issue really was spatial territory. Today, territorialisation is superseded by the fundamental precarity of what Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi describes as ‘the knowledge society’ of late capitalism. For Berardi, this precarity refers ‘to the fragmentation of time and the unceasing deterritorialization of the factors of social production’ (Berardi 2012, p.117). This is rooted in the shift to the post-industrial knowledge society in the late 60s and 70s, a shift marked by ‘technological transformations’ which ‘displaced the focus from the sphere of the production of material goods towards the sphere of semiotic goods: the info-sphere’ (2009b, p.44). Capitalism in its historical sense, as the production and exchange of material goods, was replaced with semio-capitalism, the production and exchange of signs. Under such conditions: “Both labor and capital…no longer have a stable relation to territory or community. Capital flows in the financial circuits, and enterprise is no longer based on territorialised material assets, but on signs, ideas, information, knowledge, and linguistic exchange. Enterprise is no longer linked to territory and the work process is no longer based on a community of workers…but instead takes the form of an ever-changing recombination of time fragments connected in the global network. (Berardi 2012, pp.117-18)¶ If Snyder’s film makes much of the difference between the high-tech capabilities of the global world outside Las Vegas and the mythological primitives within, this serves to emphasise the anomaly of focusing on the dangerously stupid as a spatialised, bounded group at precisely the time that the basis of such a grouping is based on the ever-changing recombination of ‘signs, ideas, information, knowledge and linguistic exchange’ rather than the solidity of, say, a fixed community. Consider, for example, the hybrid monstrosity created from mass data collection embedded within information technology, storing the extensive contents of our lives, mutated into simplistic collectives. After Brexit, this meant both ad hominem stereotypes – ‘convinced that they were right “Remainers were very much inclined to regard people who voted Leave as being old, white, under-educated stupid and racist’ (Mills, 2019, p.73) – and newfound populations such as the often-discussed ‘left behind’. This latter group emerged as a shorthand for some kind of primitive instinct-response by those incapable of strategic thought; a shorthand that, as Rafael Behr noted, ‘resonates as an analysis of social and political trends’ but ‘has become a convenient affliction projected on to diverse voters by politicians who need simple answers to complex questions’ (Behr, 2017). The left behind worked as a group because it drew on the territorialised distance between not only the economically downtrodden and the well-off, but also the inarticulate and the writers and policymakers looking for decisive answers to how Brexit happened. When Guy Standing (2018) warned that the ‘notion of “left behind” implies a static situation, which is misleading’, this is not just in an economic sense, but also in the way that the sense-making cynicism of post-Brexit analysis established itself in terms of intellectual territory: territories which no longer reflect the circulation of information and enterprise, but are nevertheless formed through particular figures and motifs with a longer culture resonance.¶ Such figures are not limited to the zombie, the racist or the socially and economically alienated. If the flow of capital creates complexities in the traditional groups of “economic and social grouping, then the models of the intellectual expert are not exempt from this. Indeed, under the conditions of semio-capitalism, the intellect becomes the key commodity: the shift to immaterial ideas, signs and knowledge creates a tension between the ideal figure of critical knowledge who spreads truth freely and universally, and the guardian of intellectual property who prevents the circulation of knowledge in order to retain its value.¶ However, rhetorically speaking the latter still depends on the former. As Berardi argues, the view of intellectual activity within the economy – such as in Marx’s discussion of the ‘general intellect’ in the Grundrisse – is that which can separate itself as independent from social conditions. ‘As the bearer of a universal human rationality, the enlightened intellectual can be considered as the social determination of Kant’s “I think”. The intellectual is the guarantor of a thought freed from any boundaries, the expression of a universally human rationality’ (Berardi 2009a, p.30). This form of enlightenment required a space ostensibly outside of social conditions, such as the traditional model of the university (Fisher, 2021, p.132). To observe the problem of sustaining such a model, one need only think of how every year the media produces stories about academic grades getting easier or harder and university entries rising or falling (given they will never stay the same, this is a perpetual motion machine of journalism),”¶ “along with the usual scoffing about ‘dumbing down’ and ‘joke degrees’. But in many cases, what are described as ‘joke’ or ‘unnecessary’ degrees are the product of years of struggle for professional recognition, such as in childcare, nursing or social work. They are, in effect, a testament to the currency of intelligence – or, at least, signifiers of intelligence, such as accredited degrees – in the development of late-capitalist economies. Boaventura de Sousa Santos thus refers to this as ‘university capitalism’: the production of ‘a commodity whose market value derives from its capacity to create other market values’ (2018, p.272). At the same time, the vocational nature of such degrees means that the expansion of the general intellect sits in tension between, on the one hand, the enhanced cognitive training of higher degrees, and on the other hand a quagmire of professional learning outcomes which replace the ‘universally human rationality’ Kant may have envisaged.”

At the end of the acceleration cycle, extinction looms. Beyond the pandemic threshold we enter a period of exhaustion: not only have our physical energies been drained by the virus, but nervous energy has waned, abruptly breaking the rhythm of social mobilisation. At the economic level the demand is in free fall not only because consumers are forced to stay home but also because of the deflation of consumerist excitement. This collective excitement has deteriorated, and this is not merely an economic deflation; it is the cause of the persistent economic downturn. The recession is the outcome of a psychological disinvestment, the consequence of a widespread withdrawal of desire. This downturn brings about a conceptual reconfiguration of the very concept of Future: first of all we should disentangle the concept of future (and also the psychological tension towards future) from the expectations of growth, expansion and acceleration, which shaped the concept of future in modern culture and imagination. Although the widespread consciousness and perception of this deflation of future is an effect of the abrupt interruption provoked by the lockdown, we should not forget that deflation was already underway. For at least two decades before the pandemic, the fact that expansion was nearing its end for non-economic reasons (environment, mental suffering) was obvious to every thinking person on the planet, with the noticeable exception of economists. Expansion grows impossible when the physical limits of the world and the neurological limits of the brain have been reached. Since that point on, the acceleration of the rhythm of communication and life has a destructive effect on the social mind, as the nervous system is disturbed by permanent hyperstimulation. The neoliberal cycle, which lasted around four decades, was essentially an attempt in postponing the big psycho-deflation and deferring the economic stagnation by the acceleration of mental productivity (nervous exploitation) and the devaluation of physical productivity (low salaries, precariousness). Extractivism of the physical resources of the planet and of the nervous resources of the brain has been the neoliberal reaction to the tendential fall in the rate of profit, but it has rapidly brought about the exhaustion of physical and nervous resources. The virus obliged the reluctant authorities of the world to accept the evidence: the age of expansion is over. They do not dare to recognise this apertis verbis, of course. But they are paralysed, or panicking, as the truth has been exposed: capitalism is dead. Now our cultural task is to think future out of the conceptual framework of expansion. Decoupling the concept of future from the expectation of expansion and acceleration means getting free from the framework of capitalism. But the separation of production from accumulation, of the useful from exchange value, of pleasure from consumption is unthinkable. Escaping from the capitalist frame implies the reactivation of a social energy of solidarity that seems unachievable after forty years of neoliberal reform and of connective mutation. Since the triumph of neoliberalism we have been taught that there is no alternative to capitalism, capitalism being the economic and cultural insurmountable border of human history. Now it’s crystal clear: if this neoliberal assumption is true, then we have to resign ourselves to the idea that extinction is the only future that our progeny can expect. However, I think that the neoliberal assumption is not true, and an alternative does exist: it is based on liberation from the obsession of economic growth; it is based on the redistribution of resources, on the reduction of labour time, and on the expansion of time dedicated to the free activity of teaching, researching, healing and taking care.

In After the Future, Bifo iterates Marx’s thesis in the radically new times of digital capitalism. And he finds that the “automaton” has multiplied its powers to disaggregate and orchestrate the parts or organs of labor; the whole psychosphere of the human being becomes subject to the movement of capital, now operating at digital speeds. With the networking powers of information and communications technology the capacities of capitalist work processes to orchestrate labor have not only been extended spatially, across the globe, but have intensified temporally also. Today’s firms do not purchase the worker as a whole, but a fragment of their activity, sensibility, attention, communicative capacity. One of Bifo’s most compelling contributions to the theory of “semiocapitalism” – capitalism that makes affects, attitudes, attributes and ideas directly productive without materializing them – is the cellularization of labor. As production becomes semiotic, cognitive workers are precariously employed – on occasional, contractual, temporary bases – and their work involves the elaboration of segments or “semiotic artefacts” that are highly abstract entities combined and recombined through an exploitative digital network only at the precise time they are required. The social field is “an ocean of valorizing cells convened in a cellular way and recombined by the subjectivity of capital”. These info-laborers are paid only for the moments when their time is made cellular, yet their entire days are subjected to this kind of production, “pulsating and available, like a brain-sprawl in waiting”, Blackberries and mobiles ever ready. The psychic and somatic form of the human cannot take this, and as our cognitive, communicative, emotional capacities become subject to cellular fragmentation and recombination under the new machine-speed of information, we get sick. Depression, panic, unhappiness, anxiety, fear, terror – these are the affective conditions of contemporary labor, the “psycho- bombs” of cognitive capitalism, each, naturally, with their own psychopharmacology. Nonetheless, we actively submit ourselves to this regime; this is the perversity of contemporary culture. Of course, the vast majority has no choice – these are the structural conditions of work. But the progressive commercialization of culture, deadening of metropolitan life, loss of solidarity, and insidious dispersal of mechanisms of competition are such that we have come to fixate our desires on work. Even as it pushes human affective and cognitive capacities to breaking point, the enterprise form is the only adequate expression of our communicative and affective qualities, and the one most able to confirm our increasingly competitive and narcissistic drives.