5.16.2022
<Technolalia> focuses on Philosophy, Culture, and Tech and how those three categories interact. The content stems from original pieces to curated links and the occasional podcast.
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Coronavirus and the Acceleration of Financialization: Problems and Strategies
By Yung Agamben
“I see Freedom, completely arm’d and victorious and very haughty,
with Law on one side and peace on the other,
A stupendous trio all issuing forth against the idea of caste;
What historic denouements are these we so rapidly approach?”
– Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
“There’s no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.”
– Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control
Introduction
A specter is haunting the hidden abode of production: the specter of financialization. This is not a new phenomenon, of course. Financialization has categorized the last 30-40 years of economic reorganization and adaptation. With the onset of Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2), all models of financialization must be reevaluated in response to the new historical circumstances we find ourselves in today. We are not dealing with the arrival of an unknown event that forces us to reorient ourselves to fundamentally new economic conditions that alter the underlying tendencies of financialization. Instead, we should consider the arrival of Coronavirus as an accelerant for existing theoretical frameworks of financialization and its trajectory. Our work must come to terms with this acceleration if there is any hope to enact political countertendencies against the devastating repercussions financialization will continue to have on wage-laborers and the structure of the global economy itself. Our job here is not to predict the precise unfolding of historical processes as they will occur. Rather, our job is like that of the trader – we don’t need to know exactly what price the financial asset being traded will be at in six months or a year, for example. Our task is to predict the direction and velocity of financialization – both of which have significantly changed with the arrival of Coronavirus and also its repercussions. If we can adjust our conceptual modeling of financialization, we stand a chance of conceiving a political program capable of countering the devastation that lies just over the horizon for millions (if not billions) of workers across multiple class categories.
What is Financialization?
We will define financialization according to the work of Marxist economist Costas Lapavitsas, who describes the term in his remarkable book, Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All as follows:
Financialization amounts to a systemic transformation of advanced capitalist economies pivoting on changes in the underlying conduct of non-financial enterprises, banks, and households. First, non-financial enterprises have become broadly involved in the realm of finance, often undertaking financial transactions independently. Financialization represents the opening of more space between non-financial enterprises and banks, with a lessening of mutual dependence among the two. Second, banks have directed their activities toward trading in open financial markets and dealing with households. Third, individuals and households have become heavily implicated in finance in terms of both borrowing (such as for housing and general consumption) and holding assets (such as for pensions and insurance).
This is an insightful definition to begin to understand what constitutes financialization, especially once we piece out what Lapavitsas is saying behind the econo-speak making our definition a bit opaque.
Beginning with the first sentence, financialization exists primarily in advanced capitalist economies, and represents changes in the “conduct” of institutions. Especially with the arrival of Coronavirus, which we will discuss in further detail later, we should qualify Lapavitsas’s claim by noting the global implications of financialization expanding far beyond the mystifying boundaries of the “advanced capitalist economy.” Financialization certainly emanates from the financial sector of advanced industrial economies, however, its repercussions disproportionately impact the “Global South” and the most vulnerable workers in the newly globalized economy. Supply chains snake through low-wage zones of misery and profit, across Southeast Asian precarity labor, African agricultural economies, etc. These are the links of the supply-chain who face the most pernicious consequences of financialization.
Now let us consider the first of three elements that constitute financialization. First, what does Lapavitsas mean when he says that non-financial enterprises are becoming more involved in financial transactions and the financial industry in general? When we say “non-financial enterprises,” we mean any enterprise that is not part of what we generally refer to as the “financial industry” – i.e. commercial and investment banking, asset management, lending, mortgaging etc. This could be any business that produces and sells a commodity in order to generate its profits. A financial enterprise on the other hand, makes profits through the manipulation of money into more money. We can think here (in exceedingly general terms) of Marx’s distinction between C-M-C circulation and M1M2 formula for fictitious capital. The former represents the value production of non-financial enterprises while the latter represents the process of value accumulation peculiar to financial enterprises. Households can also be considered non-financial enterprises up to a point – Lapavitsas argues that households have been historically non-financial, while financialization renders the household a financial enterprise. This historical distinction – the non-financial household compared to the financialized household – is important for our purposes, not to mention the strategy of banks and other financial enterprises.
Such is the meaning of Lapavitsas’s second element of financialization, wherein banks direct their activities toward households and open financial markets. What does this mean exactly? One journal article published in 2015, “The Financialization of Everyday Life or the Domestication of Finance?,” by economists L. Pellandini-Simányi, F. Hammer, and Z. Vargha explicates this relationship in more precise terms. Financialized households mean the appearance of financial products in everyday life, new ratings systems and media discussion and, most importantly, the infiltration of financial logic into the spheres of everyday life which were formerly free from these motivations. Decision processes and relations, both economic and social, are subordinated to the rationality of financial logic. In other words, households become a sphere of financial life, as families rely more and more on financial instruments for their livelihood, especially their retirement, and make decisions according to the logic of financial markets – a phenomenon that is peculiar to financialization and its transmutation of everyday life into economic relations of value.
Another reason for the financialization of the household concerns the increasing role of debt in their lives. As David Harvey points out, this is the result of increasing pressure by shareholders to make high profits in a short period of time, making employment become less stable and profitable while households have been forced to take on more and more debt. To summarize, the financialization of the household occurs through their proximity to financial instruments in their everyday lives (stocks, bonds, credit, etc.) and the increasing need to accumulate debt in order to survive precarious employment. That precarity is itself produced by financialization at the microeconomic level, or the level of the firm. Companies increasingly rely on the price of financial assets as a source of profits. Apple, a company with a market capitalization of over $900 billion, owns over $153 billion in corporate debt securities – which is more than any mutual fund in the world.
By understanding the first two elements of Lapavitsas’s definition of financialization, we understand the third and final element as well. Households have become intertwined in the global financial markets by both borrowing and buying financial assets. Expanding on Lapavitsas’s definition of financialization, both Paul Langley in The Everyday Life of Global Finance (2008) and Gerald Davis in Managed by the Markets (2009) argue that the newfound availability of financial assets has created an entirely new cultural framework. In other words, households and individual consumers are increasingly acting according the financial logic of risk management. As Greenspan and Kennedy (2008) point out, households are using leverage to finance not only their everyday financial commitments (mortgage, 401k, etc.), but also their consumption at the same time. When we talk about financialization, then, we are talking about more than an economic phenomenon, but a social and cultural phenomenon as well. Finance and its operational logic have come to rule over the lives of consumers in advanced capitalist societies. Household financialization poses a threat to the economic security and financial stability of the very households being financialized. In the macroeconomic sphere, financialization contributed to the financial crisis of 2008, as consumers were aggressively encouraged to financialize themselves through sub-prime mortgages on their houses, and increasingly predatory lending markets for consumer goods such as cars, utilities, etc.
Financialization has brought with it a pervasive rationality of risk management across public and private life, in the financial sector and non-financial enterprises, and the lives of individuals in their daily lives. Greater proximity to the financial system offers greater opportunities to obtain liquidity for any number of purposes, as well as to speculate themselves on the direction of financial markets. Financialization, in many ways, has democratized the financial system – offering the same financial products available to hedge funds, investment banks, pension funds, etc. to any individual with surplus capital and access to the internet. In reality, what separates the hedge fund manager from average Joe is a wealth of information that allows for the strategic allocation of capital for higher rewards with lower risk. The individual consumer has access to exceeding complex derivatives, clinically insane amounts of leverage for currency trading, leveraged exchange-traded-funds, abstract futures, etc.
What the individual consumer does not have is the knowledge to benefit from the myriad financial products presented to them every day. The average person does not learn the ins-and-outs of the financial world, even though the financial world has entered their own lives. At the end of the day, financialization is an extraction of surplus value from these very individuals who are kept in the dark as to the labyrinthine complications of the financial world they are now engulfed in. It is democratization only in that it ensnares individuals and institutions in the functioning of the global financial system – rarely do individuals within the democratic world benefit from the profits it produces, yet the farther an individual seems to think they are from the financial system, the more likely they are to suffer its negative consequences.
Capital’s Escape from Production
Now, remember the formula for financialization found in Marx for fictitious capital: M1 M2. Remember that this is not the usual capitalist formulation at the level of the firm which would be M1 C M2. This is the shift we have been experiencing for decades and will continue to experience at an accelerated rate due to the consequences of Covid-19, which we will get into in the next chapter. First, we must make sense of this shift in the circulation of capital. What capital is achieving is an escape into abstraction. In other words, Capital has mounted an escape from the realm of production, where the rate of profit continues to fall and where value must be extracted violently from labor. This represents a deterritorialization in the Deleuzo-Guattarian sense. Such deterritorialization takes place across a line of flight from production to this new realm of financial profits. This was the key insight by Marxist-Economists affiliated with the Monthly Review, who first saw financialization as an escape from the malfunctioning productive sector. For our purposes, we should term this financial realm as Capital-in-Itself. That is to say, Capital creates its value from itself. Through securitization, Capital has latched on to a new theory of value that threatens to extinguish labor from the process of Capital creation entirely. This is a speculative theory of value.
How does the firm generate this value? What is the alchemical process at work here that can create value from what appears to be nothing? Marx started to understand this process in the third volume of Das Kapital. The concept of “fictitious capital” is a highly useful technical term for understanding this new theory of value. In fact, Marx’s term amounts to what the firm would call “net present value accounting” – that is, the construction of ideal sums of money by discounting streams of future payments attached to financial assets. The ideal sums can fluctuate independently of the liquid capital originally used to purchase the financial asset(s). Financial prices then – as represented by the markets – represent fictitious capital. Value is thus created in one of two ways: 1) Through the discounting of future payment streams (loanable capital) and 2) Through the independent price movements of financial assets (speculation). As a firm matures, the natural tendencies of financialization increase. The larger the firm, the more it begins to rely on financial assets for profits. Capital will always follow its operative principle, that is, to seek the highest rate of return.
What does it say about capital, however, that the highest rate of return available for the biggest firms in the global economy are low-risk financial securities? Perhaps, financialization is an autumnal characteristic of both the firm as well as the of declining Western economic hegemony. The wage costs of commodity production require such large inputs for decreasing marginal returns. Another word for decreasing marginal returns is surplus-value, meaning the value the firm may extract from underpaying the workers who created the underlying value of the commodity. Capital finds itself trapped in a stream of gradually slower profit growth – an economic law directly at odds with the logic of financial value. Surplus-absorption thus moves from the declining rate of profit via surplus-value extraction, and instead absorbs value as discounted future streams of income. This is the process of financialization at its core – capital’s escape from the real of production into the abstract realm of financial assets. Value is increasingly created by returns on financial assets, while labor value is reduced to its lowest possible input level.
Coronavirus and the Acceleration of Financialization
What impact will coronavirus have on the ongoing financialization of the economy? That is a question we will not have a full answer to until we can find the necessary distance for retroactive analysis. This, however, is a problem in and of itself. We cannot wait for analytical distance to address the economic implications of a virus that threatens the long-term economic stability of every American household, worker, and employer. We need strategies now. But before we can formulate those strategies, we must understand the economic transformation in our present condition in order to chart out its ongoing trajectory.
As of April, the unemployment rate has skyrocketed to 15%, which is already 5% higher than peak unemployment during the 2008 recession. This is only the hard data we have retrospectively. The Federal Reserve, on the other hand, predicts unemployment will reach as high as 32%, leaving 47 million American workers without a job. To put that number in perspective, the highest unemployment rate in American history registered at 24.9% during the Great Depression in 1933. We are in the middle of the largest bout of unemployment our economy has ever faced. Furthermore, labor has never played less of a role in the creation of value for the economy. Corporate strategy across the country is now focused on reducing this newfound liability of using human labor to create value. While financialization has been a multi-decade trend, coronavirus has accelerated the process as firms bring this subconscious trend of the economy into conscious planning. What appeared as a slowly malfunctioning sphere of production is now interpellated by corporate technocrats as an extremely dangerous liability that must be hedged against.
Another lesson companies have learned from coronavirus is that the long-standing corporate-socialism that has defined their relationship to the government is now the expectation rather than a rare source of liquidity. Put differently, companies – especially those in especially hard-hit industries such as airlines, retail, and manufacturing – can safely expect fiscal stimulus programs to bail them out. The government continues to hedge risk in the same morally hazardous way it always has, which allows companies to operate with higher risk knowing there is always this safety net to fall back on. Taxpayer money is simply an unlisted asset for large corporations that can be conjured up as soon as risky business practices land them in hot water. In 2008, the bailout of the financial industry solidified the assumptions of the financial industry that they are simply too big to fail. Risky investments have continued unabated by government regulation, as the Treasury Department has become the risk management department for the entire industry.
For American workers – 4 out of every 5 of whom already live paycheck to paycheck – coronavirus is changing almost all aspects of social and economic relations. Financialization is rapidly recoding everything from their conception of work to their semiotic system and how they relate to one another. The government’s use of direct cash payments to help Americans through the pandemic has brought new questions to the forefront. For instance, the long-theorized idea of universal basic income has become a concrete concern. The subsequent reevaluation of work and its ontological underpinnings has arrived much faster than UBIs neoliberal proponents had anticipated. In effect, UBI could very well function as a key component of financialization’s escape from labor-value, as consumption can now be maintained by government payouts rather than wages paid out by corporations. The Fordist model of maintaining high consumption by providing relatively high wages is officially on the out (although it has been ever since financialization began its course decades ago). The UBI is a key element in the elimination of labor inputs in favor of highly-automated manufacturing, value creation through financial asset, and the placation of a labor class relegated to precarity without risking the historical worker rebellions that plagued surplus-value extractors since the dawn of capitalism.
What is perhaps the most profound threat to subjects living under the growing hegemony of finance-capital is not the external impact on our lives, but rather the internal changes that threaten to transform subjectivity itself. Subjectivity finds itself increasingly enclosed in a cybernetic system of positive feedback. Communication is now entirely mediated through technologies that subjugate language to techno-linguistic-automatisms. As the Italian autonomist Franco Berardi puts it, “the subsumption of language by the semio-capitalist cycle of production effectively freezes the affective potencies of language.” The social field has become fully enclosed within the semiotic demands of techno-finance. Our communication is digitized and reduced to efficient channels of positive feedback. This is not just how we communicate inside the corporate world, but how we communicate anything to anyone. Deprived of the spontaneous language of real-life encounters outside of the techno-sphere, language itself is deprived of its essential humanity. Rather, language is now one more component of finance-capital, a tool for efficient operational communication between machines.
Strategies for Escape and Collective Political Action
What can we do about this bleak future we have outlined so far? What are the possibilities left to humanity so that it might escape the inhumanity recoding our present and determining our future? Our ability to find new weapons will determine the possibilities of freedom from the chains of finance-capital. It is the primary aim of this paper to outline the tools and strategies for countering the hegemony of financialization. Only by understanding the historical trajectories of financialization, including its acceleration stemming from coronavirus, is it possible to determine possible lines of escape. I will begin this chapter by outlining possible political responses to the broad system itself before determining strategies for countering the subsequent internal assault on subjectivity.
First off, financialization has provided us with many weapons to turn against it. We must be able to study these tools without imposing moral connotations onto them. It is a mistake to interpret the financial system as essentially immoral, even though it threatens our own moral principles (both individual and collective). Refusing engagement with the world of speculative finance on the grounds of morality denies us any of the potential weapons it has to offer. This moral imposition functions as a further enclosure within the system we wish to escape. As it so happens, financialization has produced incredible tools for its own demolition. These tools are hidden by way of hyper-abstraction. Potent financial weapons are mystified in layers of increasing complexity. Only a handful of quantitative finance geeks can understand how many derivatives are priced at all. Financialization protects itself by rendering its components increasingly abstract, limiting knowledge of their functioning to the few financial rocket scientists. Access to this knowledge is ensured only to those who will further the interests of finance-capital. Only 55% of Americans own some type of financial asset (stock, bond, mutual fund, etc.), a percentage that has only gone down from 62% in the last two decades. An incredibly small percentage of those Americans trade financial derivatives of any kind, which for them is limited to options and futures only. The complex derivatives that make up most of the $600 trillion derivatives market operate across banks and hedge funds, mostly hidden from the sight of both average consumers and regulators alike.
While finance-capital survives by gatekeeping knowledge of its functioning, its major weakness is that it simultaneously implicates as many individuals and households as possible into that same functioning. In other words, more and more Americans are encouraged to take on debt as well as purchase financial assets. Finance-capital needs liquidity – in other words, it needs more peoples’ money in the pot to grow – which undermines its defensive gatekeeping of knowledge about financial assets themselves. Strangely enough, like never before, the average American can access increasingly complex financial products. Finance-capital is giving us increasingly powerful tools to use against it.
What are these weapons exactly? What is their practical purpose for creating lines of escape? Never before in history has the average individual been able to access so much financial firepower. Even more importantly, never have we had to tools to create value from destruction of the financial system we desire at the political level. With these tools, revolutionary movements of the future can properly address the situation of political blackmail that has eliminated any political challenge to the fundamental structure of the economy. The current system threatens revolutionaries with the promise of economic catastrophe if the system is challenged. Especially in electoral politics, voters have been historically dissuaded from economic populism with the prospect of losing their savings, retirement, and standard of living they have come to enjoy. Political revolution has been incredibly risky in this climate and makes the cost of such a movement incredibly high – with the costs disproportionately impacting the most vulnerable in society.
So how do these new weapons allow us to escape the political paradoxes of past populist movements? Now, revolutionaries can take a dual-track approach to achieving their goals. Furthermore, there has never been a time with higher possibilities of reward for those willing to challenge finance-capital. The dual-track approach boils down to this: one track consists of political demands to fundamentally change the economic system, and the other consists of utilizing collective investment vehicles to “short” the market in order to profit from market volatility created by their political demands. This money allows the revolutionary movement to continually scale-up its resources and provides a line of escape from the techno-financial enclosure. Revolutionary movements would not necessarily need to achieve all of their political demands, instead using the profits to fund autonomous projects of collective living and mutual aid. In other words, the dual-track approach offers many possibilities for escaping the current constraints of the financialized world, while increasing the chances of achieving the fundamental changes to economic, political, and social relations to the society as a whole. Practically speaking, I believe the best financial instruments to exploit for this purpose have emerged quite recently as access to volatility futures through exchange-traded funds (ETFs). These financial products are the best weapon finance has given us to wield against itself. In the event of a collapse in financial markets, these funds explode in value. An investment prior to the volatility spike pays off anywhere from 10x to 1,000x the initial investment. Revolutionary groups who pool their collective resources to invest in these products would be able to exponentially increase their resources as the markets react to their political actions. This in turn potentiates the political possibilities for revolutionaries, while allowing the choice of autonomy for its members if its political demands on the larger system are not met.
Second, we should determine what political demands have both the highest likelihood of driving up volatility in financial markets and forcing fundamental changes that might free the whole society from the tightening noose of financialization. Surprisingly, the solution to this problem is not as complex as one would think. The most effective political action that achieves both of our goals is a strategy of “fiscal noncompliance.” In his remarkable book, New York 2140, Kim Stanley Robinson imagines this political scenario 120 years from now – imagining the possibilities it opens up. “I know this all might sound radical,” the eco-revolutionary-influencer Amelia says in the novel, “A little extreme. But we have to do something, right? Or nothing will change. It will keep going on with them wrecking things…This householder’s strike is the kind of revolution where they can’t shoot you down in the public square. It’s called fiscal noncompliance. It uses the power of money against money…a very neat trick, if you ask me.” This form of revolution is successful because it, again, uses the tools of financialization against itself. As more and more households are forced to take on more and more debt, the financial system increasingly relies almost entirely on consumers funding their consumption (and even the necessities of everyday life) with high interest debt. Debt is what subjugates us to the financial system, but it is also the primary profit driver for the economy. A collective refusal to pay back creditors would send the financial markets into a spiral – a systemic meltdown of the economic system and exponential increases in volatility. The remarkable thing about fiscal noncompliance is that you would not need everyone to take part in the refusal. In fact, you would not even need a majority of the population. Due to the extraordinarily high leverage of the banking sector, as they take our debt and take out more debt using ours as collateral, a small amount of defaults is enough to light the powder-keg. Fiscal noncompliance on the part of 10-20% of the population would easily trigger a market breakdown that would fill the coffers of revolutionary collective investment vehicles and force the financial sector to go crawling back to the federal government.
What happens next is very important for achieving our second goal of fundamentally changing the system. The state must be compelled to bailout the banks on the condition that they will be nationalized this time around. Without this step, the banks will continue to be bailed out without any structural changes being made. What is particularly useful about the dual-track strategy is, in the case of political failure to nationalize the banks, a line of escape is still opened up for autonomous collective living outside of the totality. Many exciting new possibilities for experiments in communal living, mutual aid, and new modes of freedom become available to those seeking escape. Fiscal noncompliance may indeed force the hand of the federal government if we hold steadfast in our refusal, rendering the debt structure of the financial system wholly dysfunctional even if they are bailed out. The banks hold the key to infinite possibilities of new societal configurations and achieving social justice by means of material redistribution. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, “it is the banks that control the whole system and the investment of desire.”
Poetic Insurrection Against Semio-Capital
I have outlined several strategies for countering financialization with political responses to the external structures of financial hegemony, however, as we mentioned earlier, financialization permeates into the internal life of subjects under techno-finance. Deleuze summarizes the impact finance has on every semiotic system we use to communicate with each other:
Speech and communication have been corrupted. They’re thoroughly permeated by money – and not by accident but by their very nature. We’ve got to hijack speech. Creating has always been something different from communicating. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers so we can elude control.
Language has been annexed by the operational logic of techno-capital. It is subjected to the same cybernetic positive feedback proper to machines communicating with one another. In other words, the humanity of language is becoming lost, subjugated to the efficiency of financialization. Coronavirus has condensed decades of this process into imminent changes occurring in the span of months. All communication is now mediated by one form of technology or another. The social no longer exists spontaneously. Such spontaneity is the exception to the rule.
The question now is: How do we reclaim the humanity of language? How do we reactivate the potential of a language capable of abstract, interstitial enunciation of our spirit? In the words of Virginia Woolf, “we have got to teach ourselves to understand literature. Money is no longer going to do our thinking for us.” What is it about literature that makes it oppositional to the semiotic flows of capital circulation? Literature pushes language to its extreme possibilities of enunciation. It is language speaking to itself – playing with itself in dance of meaning and meanings deception. Literature is the human spirit moving through language itself. Semio-capital, on the other hand, is the reduction of language to a desert of signs collapsed toward immanence. All signs and meanings deprived of enunciation beyond their cybernetic function in the feedback loop. When we communicate through semio-capital circuits, language exchanged between humans is indistinguishable from interfacing with a machine. We are reduced to digital enunciation comprehensible to machines. Communication must be fast and effective. It follows the immutable bylaws of the economic machine. This, of course, reorients language towards its proper functioning within the machinic totality – extracting signs and senses of their human nuances and potencies.
We know this because we encounter it in our daily lives, and our daily lives are now limited to interfacing with machines even to communicate with other human beings. So what do we to do about it? What possibilities are left to us trapped in the techno-linguistic-automatisms of our daily language? Franco Berardi has done remarkable work in the past decade charting out lines of escape from the financialized language of our present condition.
For Berardi, an insurrection must be waged against these semiotic chains using poetry to counter what is a truly unpoetic annexation of human language and the level of the individual and collective social body. “Insurrection means a rising up, and also implies the full deployment of the potencies of the actor. The actor that is appearing on the historical scene today is the general intellect in the process of subjectivation. The potencies of this actor are the potencies of collective intelligence in network.” This means the poetic potentialities of our collective language can be unleashed on the whole by the individual subject crafting poetic language inside of it. Our acts of poetic uprising do indeed affect the semiotic system as a whole. We can reappropriate language back from semio-capital and put it back into its freedom of play.
What poetry also gives us is the capacity to find a rhythm different from the one imposed by the acceleration of techno-capital. The proper response to the acceleration of material circumstances is not to accelerate the operations of the psyche. Rather, the individual response to accelerationism should be a personal program of deceleration from the speeding social field. As Berardi notes, “rhythm is the common substance of signs (word, music, vision) and the brain. The mind hooks onto the other (the other mind, nature, artificial or social world) thanks to rhythmic concatenation.” The rhythm of language submitted to the operational logic of capital is increasingly fast, accelerated to produce efficient feedback between machines. Poetry, on the other hand, requires time to understand its nuance, and creates its own rhythm between signs and the brain. Poetry is thus our best line of escape from the internal rhythms being imposed upon us by the inhuman demands of finance-capital. We can use poetry to learn to breathe again according to the rhythms of a more human language, one capable of enunciating new possibilities of becoming for both humanity and language itself.
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“Only someone who is continually suffering could invent such suffering - the happiness of an eye before which the sea of existence has grown still and which now cannot get enough of seeing the surface and this colorful, tender, quivering skin of the sea: never before has voluptuousness been so modest.”
— Nietzsche, The Gay Science
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