Yesterday I spent the afternoon sorting through boxes of archived files, –class notes from college and grad school, articles on business that I had saved for a second reading that never happened, and family related materials. It was an archeological dig into the past of selves that became the person that I now am….
Aesthetics is the science dedicated to the study of the contact between the derma (the skin, the sensitive surface of our body-mind) and different chemical, physical, electromagnetic, electronic, and informational flows. ….the universe is a continuum of diverse and interrelated entities in bodily contact with each other. It is both an organic and inorganic…
Social solidarity is not an ethical or ideological value: It depends on the continuousness of the relation between individuals in time and in space. The material foundation of solidarity is the perception of the continuation of the body in the body, and the immediate understanding of my interest and your interest. —Franco “Bifo” Berardi…
Enterprises are no longer linked to a territory and the work process is no longer based on a community of workers, living together in a factory day after day, but instead takes the form of an ever-changing recombination of time fragments connected in the global network. Cognitive workers do not meet in the same…
The financial class that dominates the contemporary scene has neither attachments to territory nor to material production, because its power and wealth are founded on the total abstraction of a digitally multiplied finance. This digital-financial hyper-abstraction is liquidating both the living body of the planet and the social body. —-Franco “Bifo” Berardi excerpt The…
1977 is the year when Charlie Chaplin dies. The death of that man, in my perception, represents the end of the possibility of a gentle modernity, the end of the perception of time as a contradictory, controversial place where different viewpoints can meet, conflict, and then find progressive agreement. Charlie Chaplin is the last…
Park on Park is the name of the Mundelein car show that is held on the 2nd Wednesday evening of the summer months. Street rods, collectible cars of all descriptions are parked on and around Park Avenue for the admiration of gear heads like myself. As I grow older with every visit to a…
The center cannot hold, and things have fallen apart, detached from their meaning. The revelation of the century is the devastating spiral of abstraction and nihilism; abstraction of work from activity, abstraction of goods from usefulness, abstraction of time from sensuousness. Abstraction has detached the epidermis of language from the flesh of the linguistic…
I confess to being a fan of Bruce Springsteen. Springsteen is the Homer of my generation. I make the assertion without apology. At the Tony Awards televised live on CBS from Radio City Music Hall Springsteen delivered an abbreviated rendition of his song My Hometown which was prefaced by a moving soliloquy remembering Freehold…
Reality is not mathematical, and mathematics is not the law of reality, but a language whose consistency has nothing to do with the multilayered consistency of life. Franco Berardi, excerpt from The Uprising, On Poetry and Finance
