“sentence structure is important to me” … actually i agree, though for different reasons, though what interests me is who he criticises…
The crisis of monetary sovereignty, the inability pf the central bank to affect monetary aggregates, does not exhaust the role of the state in its function as the legal money lender of last resort but it subsumes it to processes of financial gain, turning monetary policy into a dependent variable of the financial markets…The post-Fordist architecture of the production and exchange of wealth has constructed the space of the multitude in language. The multitude is the effigy of money, the form of its sovereignty… Marazzi - Capital and Language p135…
… suppose, for example, i see a vessel on the stocks, walk up and smash the bottle hung at the stem, proclaim ‘i name this ship the Mrs Margaret Thatcher’ and for good measure kick away the chocks: but the trouble is, i was not the person chosen to name it… plagiarized from J.L Austin…, How to do things with words…
What we have left of all this history presents nothing but two languages as such, narratives or legends and proofs or figures, words and formulas. Thus it is as if we were confronted by two parallel lines which, as is well known, never meet. The origin constantly recedes, inaccessible, irretrievable. The problem is open.
I have tried to resolve this question three times. First, by immersing it in the technology of communications. When two speakers have a dialogue or a dispute, the channel that connects them must be drawn by a diagram with four poles, a complete square equipped with its two diagonals. However loud or irreconcilable their quarrel, however calm or tranquil their agreement, they are linked, in fact, twice: they need, first of all, a certain intersection of their repertoires, without which they would remain strangers; they then band together against the noise which blocks the communication channel. These two conditions are necessary to the diaIogue, though not sufficient. Consequently, the two speakers have a common interest in excluding a third man and including a fourth, both of whom are prosopopoeias of the,powers of noise or of the instance of intersection.(1) <#1>Now this schema functions in exactly this manner in Plato’s /Dialogues/, as can easily be shown, through the play of people and their naming, /their resemblances and differences/, their mimetic preoccupations and the dynamics of their violence. Now then, and above all, the mathematical sites, from the /Meno /through the /Timaeus/, by way of the /Statesman /and others, are all reducible geometrically to this diagram. Whence the origin appears, we pass from one language to another, the language said to be natural presupposes a dialectical schema, and this schema, drawn or written in the sand, as such, is the first of the geometric idealities. Mathematics presents itself as a successful dialogue or a communication which rigorously dominates its repertoire and is maximally purged of noise. Of course, it is not that simple. The irrational and the unspeakable lie in the details; listening always requires collating; there is always a leftover or a residue, indefinitely. But then, the schema remains open, and history possible. The philosophy of Plato, in its presentation and its models, is therefore inaugural, or better yet, it seizes the inaugural moment.
@khaoid - the answer to your second question is contained in the co-option of Agamben’s extended spectacle ‘it is clear that the spectacle is language, the very communicativity or linguistic being of humankind’ did Agamben stop writing because of this extension of the spectacle into language ? no.
Do I stop working as an engineer, a philosopher because Agamben is right and I extend the logic further into human culture ? no, of course not. One works in the hope of recovering the ground because there is a positive possibility of using it against it…
(and all real analyses of the spectacle are Marxist) should deal with the fact that capitalism (or whatever concept you want to use to describe and define current world history) is directed not just towards the expropriation of production but also towards the alienation of language, images and data itself, in other words of the linguistic and communicative nature of humans. Beyond this terrain into the commons themselves. Alienation within capitalism is not only alienation from the material conditions of ones one production and reproduction but also alienation from the means by which we might share what is common.
I would say that Debord’s term for this, the spectacle is a way of describing simply the full force of this alienation is so harmful for both individual persons and the worlds communities simply because it is so deeply embedded in all our societies. The spectacle sends its ideological memes into our lives and homes not only through the mass and social media but also directly into our abilities, our capacity to communicate, our ability to have things in common…
“Language was becoming a primary factor in the production of good and in the way they acquired economic value…” Mecchia’s introduction startlingly telling phrase should announce the text’s association with Agamben’s extension of the #spectacle into language. But in fact it does not and I have the impression that the text has an under theorized understanding of the relation between the economic and the spectacle, take for example Marazzi’s early proposition that “… the entry of communication and therefore of language in the sphere of production is at the very origin of the epochal turn characterizing the present…” The key concept is ‘communication’ for in a sense it’s clear that Marazzi does not recognize the limitation in correlating language and communication. And then shortly afterwards “…Formal-logical language was the basis of the linguistic-machine theorized in 1936 by the English mathematician Alan Turing, which is the origin of today’s information technologies. This was a linguistic machine for which the most imprtant element is the organization of a grammer whose symbols move on a magnetic assembly line, moving back and forth between one position and another….” Is this reductionist enough or is it an evasion of the problem ? Isn’t it clear by now that the spectacle, our socio-economic system follows a more reductionist and complete trajectory - image > language > data and networks. That these elements of the spectacle cannot be reduced to language, because image, data and networks are not forms of language but rather have there own rather precise structures.
The consequence of this is to demonstrate how the Marazzi text obeys a restriction of economic thought, perhaps we can say that Post-Fordism existed in the early 90s and yet clearly if we were not also in Fordism then, so equally we cannot be in Post-Fordism now as the Crisis of Neoliberalism grows… So that what if… it was an historical moment, a trajectory that has ended because the Post-Fordist moment existed purely to support the Neo-Liberal socio-economic order of accumulation. Which has the consequence that to describe it through an incorrect analysis of the spectacle through language is also surely to be wrong.
