(via Dante Monson)
The financial has devastated the body and the soul of the European society, so now Europe is a corpse, a zombie. The movement is here to invent a new Europe, emancipated from the dogmas of competition and accumulation. Europe will be reborn thanks to the emergence of the social and erotic body of the general intellect. Thanks to the insurrection of the movement’s sensuous intelligence, Europe is going to be place of solidarity and of beauty.
Excerpted from ‘Un Heimlich’ in Net-time:
“1. The landscape at the end of the year 2010.
The Obama hope has dissolved, and the European crisis has broken out. A new Logic has been installed at the heart of the European life, since the financial crisis of Greece: Angela Merkel, Nicholas Sarkozy and Jean-Claude Trichet resolved that European society has to sacrifice its current levels of life, public school system, its civility, in order to pay the debts accumulated by the financial elite. A sort of directorate has taken hold of the Union reasserting the failed dogmas of Neoliberal monetarism: reduction of labor cost, cuts in social spending, school?s privatization, impoverishment of daily life.
Casting the shadow of a long lasting recession on the future of the last generation, Europe is now a blackmail. But if the horizon is darkening, unpredictable events are happening, disquieting and exhilarating at the same time, on the European scene. I see the horsemen of apocalypse and I like that sound.
2. Wikileaks has shown the infinite potency of collective networked intelligence.
The event orchestrated by Assange is the unleashing of the general intellect’s creative force. We already knew that diplomats are paid to lie, and the military are paid for killing civilians. The lesson of Wikileaks is not so much in the contents of the disclosures, but in the activation of solidarity, complicity and independent collaboration between cognitarians: programmers, hardware technicians, journalists working together and sharing the same goal: destabilize totalitarian power. From this lesson a new generation of rebels will find the way towards autonomy, and self-organization of the general intellect.
3. Rebellion is spreading in the cities of Europe, from London to Rome to Athens, but street riots is not the only language of this movement.
What is at stake in the mass riots of December? Rebels know very well they are not staging a military fight against police and the State. They don?t care that much about police and State. They are looking for recomposition of the social body and re-activation of the erotic body of the general intellect.
During the last ten years precarization isolation and competition in the labor market have caused dissociation of the networked collective intelligence from the social body of the cognitariat. Simultaneously the acceleration of the Infosphere (intensification of the rhythm of cognitive exploitation) has stressed the social Psychosphere, provoking loneliness, panic, depression, dis-empathy. In the street riots cognitarians are looking for empathic rhythm. Bodily sensibility and desire want to flow again. The first generation that learned more words from a machine than from the mother is going to the streets to recompose their body.
4. General intellect is looking for a body
The student’s struggles are not a sudden outburst, but the beginning of a long lasting process that will mark the next decade, a European insurrection of sort. Insurrection means raising up, and also full deployment of the potencies of the actor. The actor entering the historical scene is the General intellect in subjectivation. The full deployment of the potencies of the General intellect falls beyond the sphere of Capitalism, and implies the re-activation of sensibility. Sensibility, the ability to understand what cannot be verbalized, has been jeopardized in the process of precarization and fractalization of time. In order to re-activate sensibility, art and therapy and political action have to gather. “