Schizo-Economy

A New Disciplinary Field

At the end of the period of capitalist triumphalism and neoliberal ideological hegemony, must we return to the old analytical categories of Marxism and the political strategies of the twentieth-century workers' movement, to the horizons of democratic socialism or revolutionary communism? Nothing would be more inconclusive. The capitalism of mass networks that was fully implemented in the 1990s has produced social forms that are completely irreducible to the Marxist analysis of class. The categories of the critique of political economy are now insufficient, because processes of subjectivation traverse fields that are much more complex. A new disciplinary field is starting to be delineated in the encounter between the territories of economics, semiology, and psychochemistry.

Semio-capital is capital-flux that coagulates in semiotic artefacts without materializing itself. The concepts forged by two centuries of economic thought seem to have disintegrated; they seem inoperative and incapable of comprehending a great deal of the phenomena that have emerged in the sphere of social production since the time when production became cognitive. Cognitive activity has always been at the basis of human production, including production of a more mechanical variety. There is no human labor process that does not imply the exercise of intelligence. But now cognitive capacity is becoming the essential productive resource. In the sphere of industrial labor, the mind was put to work as a repetitive automatism, as the physiological support of muscular movement. Today the mind is at work as innovation, as language and as a communicative relation. The subsumption of the mind under the process of capitalist valorization leads to a genuine mutation. The conscious and sensitive organism is submitted to competitive pressure, to an acceleration of stimuli, to constant attentive stress. As a result, the mental environment, the infosphere in which the mind develops and enters into relations with other minds, becomes a psychopathogenic environment. To understand semio-capital's infinite game of mirrors, we must outline a new disciplinary field delimited by three aspects:

• • the critique of the political economy of connective intelligence;

• • the semiology of linguistic-economic fluxes;

• • a psychochemistry of the infospheric environment that studies the psychopathogenic effects of economic exploitation on the human mind.

The process of digital production is tending to assume a biological form. It is becoming like an organism: the nervous system of an organization is analogous to the human nervous system. Every industrial enterprise has "autonomic" systems, operational processes that must function for its survival. What was lacking from organizations in the past were the links between pieces of information, corresponding to neurons interconnected in the brain. The networked digital business functions like an excellent artificial nervous system. In it, information flows quickly and naturally, like thought in a human being, and we are able to use technology to govern and co-ordinate groups of people with the same speed with which we can concentrate on a specific problem. According to Bill Gates (Business @ the Speed of Thought), the conditions have now been created for the realization of a new kind of economic system, centered on what can be defined as "Business at the speed of thought."

In the connected world, the retroactive loops¹ of general systems theory are fused with the dynamic logic of biogenetics in a post-human vision of digital production. Human minds and human flesh will be able to integrate themselves with the digital circuit thanks to interfaces of acceleration and simplification: a model of bio-info production is emerging that produces semiotic artefacts capable of automatically replicating living systems in accordance with the laws of the capitalist economy. Once fully operative, the digital nervous system can rapidly install itself in every form of organization. This means that it is only in appearance that Microsoft concerns itself with software, products and services. In reality, the hidden aim of software production is that of wiring the human mind into a network continuum² of the cybernetic type, destined to structure the fluxes of digital information via the nervous system of all the key institutions of contemporary life. Microsoft needs therefore to be considered as a global virtual...