Franco 'Bifo' Berardi (2009) _Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the pathologies of the post-alpha generation_. London: Minor Compositions. At this point in time, technical systems and scientific and creative activity are captured by semio-capital, leading to psychopathology. We have been learning words from the machine not by the mother says Barardi (in typically Italian style perhaps, although actually quoting Rose Golden from 1975) in situation where the learning of language and affectivity have been separated (2009: 9) - echoing Christian Marazzi's writing on the relations between economics, language and affect (a situation where people have become effectively dyslexic, 'incapable of reading a page from beginning to end according to sequential procedures, incapable of maintaining concentrated attention on the same object for a a long time', in Barardi 2009 40-1). Extended to intellectual and social behavior, Berardi calls this a catastrophe of modern humanism, where we no longer have sufficient attention spans for love, tenderness and compassion. Semio-capitalism is the term that Franco Beradi gives to the current system where informational capitalism incorporates linguistic labour (he is combining semiotics, the science of signs, and capitalism, the social system founded on the exploitation of labour and the accumulation of capital). This is where media meets capital, poetry meets advertising and scientific thought meets enterprise (2009: 18). The term emphasizes how language has become fully integrated into the valorization process effecting both the economic and linguistic fields thus contributing to the crisis of value. The Marxist theory of value is seen to be inadequate because of the difficulty in calculating working time related to signification as opposed the relative ease of calculating working time against making traditional material goods. Similarly there are effects on language production as it becomes increasingly economicised: supply and demand correspond to an excess of signs and levels of social attention (the so-called attention economy [cf. Davenport and Bleick who argue that under hyper-saturated informational capitalism we have no time left for attention]). 'If we want to speak of demand and supply, we must reason in terms of fluxes of desire and semiotic attractors…' (2009: 38). Berardi sees added consequences in terms of the psyche, as language acts on the construction of subjectivity itself. He says, 'If we want to understand the contemporary economy we must concern ourselves with the psychopathology of relations.' (2009: 37) Indeed semio-capital (over) produces psychic stimulation (not material goods). The fundamental struggle, or 'bifurcation' for Berardi, is between machines for liberating desire and mechanisms of control over the imaginary. Thus, various liberatory strategies such as refusal of work, the invention of temporary autonomous zones, free software initiatives, and so on, offer 'dynamic recombination'; they offer progressive innovation not new forms of totality (2009: 72). Here, he is addressing problems of the Hegelian historical subject, and stressing processes of subjectivation (instead of the subject), taking the phrase from Guattari. The same might be said of code in that it is not simply deterministic or totalitarian (despite symbolizing the inhuman universality of the circulation of information and finance). Whereas, in general, unhappiness is encouraged to bolster consumption (so-called shopping therapy, and certainly this is also in the pharmaceutical industry's interests), this has to be carefully managed. 'The masters of the world do not want humanity to be happy, because a happy humanity would not let itself be caught up in productivity [...]. However, they try out useful techniques to make unhappiness moderate and tolerable, for postponing or preventing a suicidal explosion, for inducing consumption' (2009: 43) (not least of drugs). [After 9/11, 'suicide is the decisive political act of our times' says Beradi (2009: 55). Citing Stockhausen's comments, he thinks the history of the avant-garde culminates in 9/11, 'terrorizing suicide is the total work of art of the century with no future' (2009: 129). Moreover, he thinks this exemplified in the example of the Finnish youngster Pekka Auvinen, who turned up at school and shot eight people including himself, wearing a T-shirt with the sentence 'Humanity is overrated'. For Berardi, this typifies the communicative action of the arts and the pathology of the psycho-social system.] Only the autonomy of intellectual labour from economic rule can save us semio-capital. Indeed the refusal of work is closely associated with intellectual labour as a kind of freedom from labour in his terms rather than be bound to profit and power (his example is the merchant who robbed collective intelligence, Bill Gates, and the idiot warrior, George Bush, who together suffocated intelligence, 2009: 60). Berardi is invoking general intellect and the social function of intellectual (or cognitive) labour, charted historically through hegel's move from in-itself to for-itself (self-class-consciousness of conditions) and Gramsci's organic intellectual (intellectuals with the working class) to 'mass intellectuality' in the work of Virno et al where labour and language re no longer separated. The point is that intellectual and linguistic labour is no longer separated from general conditions of labour (or, to explain more fully, that there is no longer a separation between ordinary labouring and intellectual activity of what was once considered to be of a superior kind). -- Repression: In _Civilisation and its Discontents_, Freud asserts that capitalism is founded on the sublimation of the individual and collective libido. In Marxist thinking, something similar can be detected in the way that repression is socially determined and can only be released by freeing productive desire. In the 1970s, Herbert Marcuse's _Eros and Civilisation_ and more so Deleuze and Guattari's _Anti-Oedipus_ argue for the liberatory potential of desiring production. The influence of Freud is felt even in its rejection. In Berardi's schizo-analytic terms, 'A semiotic regime is repressive when one, and only one, signified is ascribed to each signifier.' (2009: 111). He is thinking of how interpretation has become schizophrenic (like fast speech), and how the relations between metaphors and things, representation and life, have become thoroughly confused, leading him to conclude that: 'Whilst the prevailing epidemic pathology of modernity was the neurosis produced by repression, the pathologies spreading epidemically today manifest signs of psychosis and panic. A hyper-stimulation of attention reduces the ability to critically and sequentially interpret the speech of the other who tries and yet fails to be understood.' (2009: 113) -- Democracy: 'Democracy is becoming more an empty ritual, devoid of the ability to deliver true alternatives and true choices.' 'The marriage of the economy and techne has made democracy a dead word' (Berardi 2009: 28)