Table Of ContentVALUE/S
VALUE/S
Value/s Algotaylorism Exposition
an Automatic Zine
made with MACAO’s Archive Curated by
from 2012 to 2019 Aude Launay
macaomilano.org
13.02/26.04.2020
Exposed by La Kunsthalle Mulhouse
Maddalena Fragnito and Emanuele Braga http://kunsthallemulhouse.com/
Common Intelligence by Emanuele Braga
Abstract
Common Intelligence
by Emanuele Braga
Abstract
If the world is on fire it will not be an artificial intelligence that turns it off. What is needed is a
Common Intelligence, a use of technology that can build a non-oppressed social body.
What is beyond the apocalyptic singularity daughter of the anthropocene? What is beyond a
technological drift that destroys energy resources?
Social cooperation must be radically rethought and must distance itself from the modern project
as an exasperation of control through the technical domain on nature and bios.
We need to better understand how large-scale social cooperation is destroying the planet,
creating economic inequalities, and the power of life and death along the lines of gender and
race.
The social cooperation that is destroying the planet and reproducing exploitation processes on
multiple levels is inscribed in our bodies. We want to travel around the world with airplanes,
have a big car, devote so much attention to the luminous screens of our social devices, we want
these techniques of construction of social cooperation. But these same techniques control us,
impoverish us, make us sad and fire the amazon. This ontological contradiction is interesting to
me. Why do we value what oppresses us?
This paper will follow an unconventional methodology: it aims to be an exercise in sharing
questions and references, I will try to define the boundaries of a struggle and to identify its
possible alliances.
What do we value?
Talking about value is not just an issue of money, finance, logistics, work automation and the
cost of living ... Talking about value also means talking about what interests us. It is a question
of body and subjectivity. Something acquires a value that we are willing to pay, only starting
from the fact that we want it. We are willing to pay to realize ourselves, to build our future, to
escape from our anxieties and fears, to satisfy our needs. In this sense, a question to start with
is how does our desire work?
Pierre Klossowski in 1970 writes La monnaie vivante (The Living Currency) and makes an
important reading of the relationship between sexuality and capitalism. In short, he puts the
theory of value in direct relation to the theory of desire. Foucault will write a letter to Klossowski
in which he greets the manuscript as the most important text of the 20th century. In reading this
text are these questions: what do we value? Why are we willing to work, to struggle and make
all the sacrifices we make? And why is the value we give to things a social experience? That is
to say, why does the desire to do something, give importance to something, define an economy,
a circulation of values? But above all, why do those who acquire value are objects, needs,
hopes, future scenarios, political projects, or an equivalent as abstract as that of money? Why in
the face of the need to satisfy our impulses, which are different, amoral, libidinal, inconsistent,
non-negotiable, do we construct objects, social architectures, fantasies of every kind in which
we identify ourselves?
Klossowski says that each of us is made up of a multiplicity of impulses that we cannot keep
together. These impulses are contradictory and changeable, so instead of satisfying them we
create ghosts, fictitious identities, to which we dedicate our whole life to satisfy. Instead of
satisfying the multiplicity of our impulses, we build phantoms or fantasies, which we later wish to
achieve.
A blind faith in technology
Imagination always creates a debt, says Klossowski. The concept of fantasy, phantasm, fiction
is directly connected to the concept of debt. We invest in an object the expectation of what we
do not have. Capitalism, which is not stupid, transforms desire into induced needs. We thus find
ourselves wishing for a series of things to which we will dedicate our whole life, like a job, a
series of objects and lifestyles that we cannot do without having or achieving. This imaginative
force, this collective production of ghosts / fictions and the circulation of desire is what creates
an enormous debt, to which we dedicate all our life and that of future generations to repay. And
that's why we love, we want a good job, beautiful cars and beautiful women, being famous,
social fictions that bind us and suddenly become undisputed social needs.
Even Maurizio Lazzarato in La fabbrica dell'uomo indebitato, describes the debt as a permanent
anthropological situation that defines the existence of the post-Fordist person. The imperative of
having to repay a debt in order to be able to be successful, and the production of subjectivity
that derives from it, in hindsight, has its roots more in religion than in secular political economy:
"Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors ”. In the Our Father (Lord’s prayer), the most
important Christian prayer, salvation is invoked in proportion to our ability to repay debts. And,
again as Lazzarato points out, in German there is only one word to define both guilt and debt:
“Schuld”.
In modernist design, while fantasy creates a debt to the real, technology shows how to
implement it. In short, capitalism transforms desire into the naturalization of certain needs, and
need transforms desire into a functional program. This is how we move from a series of non-
negotiable impulses to a functional program that defines what is useful to do.
For this reason, there is no opposition between faith, trust, cooperation and technology. It is
necessary to have faith and to cooperate (to obey the same protocols) to implement the
program. In the modernist project faith in a collective project that must be realized goes hand in
hand with the social algorithms we need to implement it.
In The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics,
