The difference is in the touching

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (HarperVoyager, 2008) pp. 200-201

Do your own bit of saving

The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are. They're Caesar's praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, "Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal." Most of us can't rush around, talking to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven't time, money or that many friends. The things you're looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book. Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (HarperVoyager, 2008) p. 112

The pores in the face of life

So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam. Even fireworks, for all their prettiness, come from the chemistry of the earth. Yet somehow we think we can grow, feeding on flowers and fireworks, without completing the cycle back to reality. Do you know the legend of Hercules and Antaeus, the giant wrestler, whose strength was incredible so long as he stood firmly on the earth. But once he was held, rootless, in mid-air, by Hercules, he perished easily.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (HarperVoyager, 2008) pp. 108-109

The world comes into existence as a world of language

Language has an infinite potency, but the exercise of language happens in finite conditions of history and existence. Thanks to the establishment of a limit, the world comes into existence as a world of language. Grammar, logic, and ethics are based on the institution of a limit. But infinity remains unmeasurable.

Poetry is the reopening of the indefinite, the ironic act of exceeding the established meaning of words.

Franco "Bifo" Berardi, The Uprising (semiotext(e), 2012) p. 158

Insurrection is a refrain

Insurrection is a refrain helping to withdraw the psychic energies of society from the standardized rhythm of compulsory competition-consumerism, and helping to create an autonomous collective sphere. Poetry is the language of the movement as it tries do deploy a new refrain.

Franco "Bifo" Berardi, The Uprising (semiotext(e), 2012) p. 151

Poetry is language's excess

In order to accelerate the circulation of value, meaning is reduced to information, and techno-linguistic devices act as the communicative matrix. The matrix takes the place of the mother in the process of generating language.

But language and information do not overlap, and language cannot be resolved in exchangeability. In Ferdinand de Saussure's parlance, we may say that the infinity of the parole exceeds the recombinant logic of the langue, such that language can escape the matrix and reinvent a social sphere of singular vibrations intermingling and projecting a new space for sharing, producing, and living.

Poetry opens the doors of perception to singularity.

Poetry is language's excess: poetry is what in language cannot be reduced to information, and is not exchangeable, but gives way to a new common ground of understanding, of shared meaning: the creation of a new world.

Franco "Bifo" Berardi, The Uprising (semiotext(e), 2012) p. 147

The right to the city is an empty siginifier

This poses a problem: to claim the right to the city is, in effect, to claim a right to something that no longer exists (if it ever truly did). Furthermore, the right to the city is an empty signifier. Everything depends on who gets to fill it with meaning. The financiers and developers can claim it, and have every right to do so. But then so can the homeless and the sans-papiers. We inevitably have to confront the question of whose rights are being identified, while recognizing, as Marx puts it in Capital, that "between equal rights force decides." The definition of the right is itself an object of struggle, and that struggle has to proceed concomitantly with the struggle to materialize it.

David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (Verso, 2013) p. xv

The content of works of art is never the amount of intellect pumped in to them

Even in the most sublimated work of art there is a hidden 'it should be otherwise'. When a work of art is merely itself and no other thing, as in a pure pseudo-scientific construction, it becomes bad art – literally pre-artistic. The form of true volition, however, is mediated through nothing other than the form of the work itself, whose crystallization becomes an analogy of that other condition which should be. As eminently constructed and produced objects, works of art, including literary ones, point to a practice from which they abstain: the creation of a just life. This mediation is not a compromise between commitment and autonomy, nor a sort of mixture of advanced formal elements with an intellectual content inspired by genuinely or supposedly progressive politics. The content of works of art is never the amount of intellect pumped in to them; if anything, it is the opposite.

Theodor Adorno, 'Commitment' in Utopias (ed. by Richard Noble) (Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Ltd, 2009) p. 48

The future is over

Exhaustion is a cursed word in the frame of modern culture, which is based on the cult of energy and the cult of male aggressivity. But energy is fading in the postmodern world, for many reasons that are easy to detect.

Energy is fading because of the demographic trend: mankind is growing old, as a whole, because of the prolongation of life expectancy, and because of the decreasing birth rate. A sense of exhaustion results from this process of general aging, and what has been considered a blessing – the prolonged life expectancy – may prove to be a misfortune, if the myth of energy is not restrained and replaced with a myth of solidarity and great compassion. Energy is also fading because basic physical resources like oil are doomed to extinction or dramatic reduction. Finally, energy is fading because competition is stupid in the age of the general intellect. The general intellect is not based on juvenile impetus and male aggressivity – on fighting, winning, and appropriation. It is based on cooperation and sharing.

This is why the future is over, and we are living in a space that is beyond the future. If we are able to come to terms with this postfuturistic condition, we'll renounce accumulation and growth, and will be happy in sharing the wealth from our past of industrial labor and from our present of collective intelligence.

If we are not able to do this, we will be doomed to a century of violence, misery, and war.

Franco "Bifo" Berardi, The Uprising (semiotext(e), 2012) pp. 81-82

Our prospect is a paradigmatic shift

The prospect open to us is not a revolution. The concept of revolution no longer corresponds to anything, because it entails an exaggerated notion of political will over the complexity of contemporary society. Our prospect is a paradigmatic shift: to a new paradigm that is not centered on product growth, profit, and accumulation, but on the full unfolding of the power of collective intelligence.

Franco "Bifo" Berardi, The Uprising (semiotext(e), 2012) p. 64

Reality is not mathematical

The faith in the financial balance which is imposed on the European population is based on a philosophical misunderstanding: the promoters of financial stability think that the social body and mathematics belong to the same sphere. They are wrong, as 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 "Bifo" Berardi, The Uprising (semiotext(e), 2012) p. 33

Poetic language is the insolvency in the field of enunciation

Poetic language is the insolvency in the field of enunciation: it refuses the exaction of a semiotic debt. Deixis acts against the reduction of language to indexicalization and abstract individuation, and the voice acts against the recombinant desensualization of language.
Poetic language is the occupation of the space of communication by words which escape the order of exchangeability: the road of excess, says William Blake, leads to the palace of wisdom. And wisdom is the space of singularity, bodily signification, the creation of sensuous meaning.

Franco "Bifo" Berardi, The Uprising (semiotext(e), 2012) p. 22

The past buries the past

The past buries the past and must end in silence, but it can be a conscious silence that rests open-eyed.

Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea (Book Club Associates, 1978) p. 500