from where the wall is cracked

‘The PCI is the saving grace of Italy and its poor democratic institutions. The PCI is a clean country in a dirty country, an honest country in a dishonest country, an intelligent country in an idiotic country, an educated country in an ignorant country, a humanist country in a consumerist country.’

We will have to pursue the slow trials and tribulations of a properly psychedelic and liberated reason. We will have to learn to endure the hardships of practical, political clairvoyance and to master the twists and turns of our freedom.

The generalized gathering of human productive capacities under the complex regulation of the matrix of relations that constitute spectacular society simultaneously extract profit and manufacture “consent.” With the rise of visuality comes the erosion of language and therefore of certain kinds of reason. As I have suggested, “consent” includes both the organization of mass desire and sensibility, as well as the rendering invisible, and thus effectively unconscious for the society of the spectacle, the situation and indeed existence of a huge portion of the global population. A third element in the paying of/for attention, an element implied by the economic and social capture of corporeal practice by vast networks of structured attention, has perhaps received its strongest formulation in the recent work of Paolo Virno. In A Grammar of the Multitude, Virno claims, more or less correctly I think, that capital has captured the cognitive-linguistic capacities of humanity.5 These capacities, what Marx once called “the general intellect” and which were once part of the commons, have been subsumed for capitalist production. We speak, act, think, behave, and micromanage ourselves and others according to the “score” that is the general intellect—in short, the protocols or grammar of capital. For Virno, each of our acts becomes a kind of virtuoso performance of the score that orchestrates contemporary life under the regime of capital accumulation. This final subsumption of our cognitive-linguistic capacities by capital (and its huge industries dedicated to the production of signs) is the mark of the real subsumption of society by capital and the full economicization not only of culture but of what was once called “human.” That humanity, whether dancing and wailing on our screens, repressed beyond their frames, or stammering in our heads is the specter haunting the society of the spectacle—in the world of paying attention, humanity has become its own ghost.

It’s the same with the idea of a riot as mindless. It’s not. People are within that thinking about how to make it continue, how to make it effective. It’s a thinking response to a situation, and out of that comes creativity. It's like Hong Kong, where they’re fighting with umbrellas, making their own catapults.