OWS (4): As Tina Turner propounded: “We don’t need another hero.”—in response to Vincent

Berardi states “[m]oney (i.e. economics) and the State (i.e. politics) are no longer able to govern or discipline the world of production, now that its center is not a de-brained force, a uniform and quantifiable time of manual work. That center is now occupied by mind flows, by the ethereal substance of intelligence, which eludes every measurement and cannot be subjected to any rule without indicating enormous pathologies and causing a truly maddening paralysis of cognition and affectivity.” (87: After the Future)

In Vincent’s lucid summary of economic / technologic ‘exchange currency,’ do we see arteries of the new ether. “At the time when technological infrastructure has permitted trading to speed up beyond the limits of human perception, thus creating what we may call with Virilio a “negative horizon” behind an architecture that is thoroughly oriented on the speed of light, clustering around the entry points of fiber-optic cables, “twittering” has become the negative horizon of language.” The possible outcome of the OWS franchise demands interrogation, as Vincent provides: “[t]he gambling of the market has become the gambling of language, the structural absence of “knowing what to say.”

Vincent’s analysis seems tethered to Derrida’s exergue, defined generically as “a space beneath the main design of a coin for the insertion of the date.” What could be thought as a window to a site/space of production encapsulates the myth of origination of a message cluster. Vincent presents this via Virilio’s “negative horizon.” Thinking the destructive character, the subject of late capitalism means a question of ethics is demanded.

Based on a novel zone, the exergue is the negative organism of the subject. The twit who tweets mingles in this ethereal window mirror. For who or what do they speak? Berardi’s economic and technologic fulcrum comprised of “impotent” and “depressed” activists need to rethink and rebuild the social by autonomous positivity. First by enduring a nighttime this exergue links to a possibility first defined as “escape.” This Deleuzian vamp on flight means activist finally escapes ‘bare life’, that is, living-sacrificed in a de/subjectification night of being. Lorenzo Chiesa, co-author of \”The Italian Difference\” has analyzed this as the emergence of “the hero of politics.”

Beyond the no-subject and ‘nihilism’ of deconstruction, in the Levinisian sense of other, Berardi’s articulation engages the exergue: “…the problem of depression and of exhaustion is never elaborated in an explicit way in Guattari. I see here a crucial problem of the theory of desire: the denial of the problem is that the organism is intrinsically limited, and when you speak of subjectification you are not only speaking of enunciation, but also of the organic dimension of the enunciator.” The coin horizon of the occupy franchise bears this secret origin and consequent myth cluster. Berardi continues, “organism” cannot be defined, rather it is a “process of exceeding…going beyond a threshold” thus “‘becoming other’…a crucial point, but it’s also a dangerous point.” (178)

In America such pathologies emerged in the inane desires of the Tea Party. America’s ‘heroes’ whose appearance is clearly contradictory, denotes a dialectical exhibition of subject confronting the Absolute. Thus a strip mining of reason shows Capital heads to headlessness. This spatial reduction to no space in the point-manifold of knowledge summons The Beverly Hillbillies introductory theme. Capitalism has struck the artery of being with the end of perceptible precision firing madly at the running bunny. Targeting fails. Mutations of any ‘saying’ is the spillage or seepage of the mercurial blood supporting the brain of capitalist ideology. One emerges from bare life in clownish magnificence. These arteries are worms, membrane tubes eating and passing dirt in the ground of metaphysics. From turned earth the Tea Party indeed operate out of grievance, but not by way of reason, for no reason satisfies zealotry. The illusory desire for the ‘real America’ is a destructive one. Imbued with negativity their opaque rationale is their insistence to destroy civic space. They shit where they sleep. The civic space they emerged from is now lost to the capitalism they protect from “socialism.” Radical origination destroys its regulatory actuality like a bullet travelling through a spine: in one giant explosion, a dust of blood and flesh, a variation of the suicide bomber. In terms of speech what has been ruptured cannot be contained in coherent thought nor in the sense of liberal democracy.

Berardi links this to a “neoliberal rule” that “eroded the cultural and material basis of social civilization, which was the progressive core of modernity.” Irreversible one “has to face it.” It is no less a “mutation produced by global capital intermingled with recombinant technologies.” (177) We must confront such mutations, first, the Tea Party and its “headless” leadership coopted by Reagan acolytes, disciples who abide by the virtues of media mythologies.

OWS risks this faux pas. Are they Agambian larvae? Slimy membranes passing through the ground of being? In our nighttime, the constellation of the soil contains the compressed, crushed and fragmented DNA of natural thought. We face a reduction of our constructed world to its static obliteration and recombination (in the midst of austerity). Berardi’s capitalism demands a totality on all activity, total ‘participation’, it wants to dominate agency. It’s symptom is arrogance. Our arrogance is based on technological domination of language and worm herding. Democratic totality cannot compete with capitalism. A totalistic ‘truth’ fails to find words.

To flip a coin or roll dice as a type of inside trader flirts with total war. Unfortunately for the villain, capital cannot defeat language. Vincent reminds us, language ‘is’, always is, irreducible (being). For each breath emits from a site and the radical appearance of human life is its access to thinking it. Nothing posthuman about that. If relegated to appearance or hermeneutical quests our compensation for origin’s lack must develop an ethics not abandon humanity. We may be distracted, depressed and even kill ourselves, yet a robust and contemplative recovery of being demands we recover essence.

Berardi propounds “[a]ctivism is fake, when no horizon can be seen.” Berardi calls for “active withdrawal…the creation of spaces of autonomy where solidarity can be rebuilt” in order to “reverse the trend.” (178) Thus from the negative we emerge, but take care. Reestablishing currency risks a claim on being both capital and democracy fail to devour. The buffet of being is truly illusive. The irreducible opening of language, a type of tesseract, multi-faceted brilliance is ours. One must make a political choice based on this spectral blossom. Something shines and deserves our analysis. If not actual appearances, rather of sound, even if nothing is your sound, then a sound being of some negative kingdom, the ethics of “the Ungovernable.”