The Poetics Seminar: IV. The Daydreamer
12/12/2017
I want to start by reflecting on some recent writings by Franco Berardi. In his book, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance, Berardi proposes that it is through poetic language that we may counter the current dominance of “financialization” and “deregulated predatory capitalism” – the ways in which neoliberal economies shape our bodies, our lives, and our communities; and further, produces an “abstract” relation to them.
“Abstraction has detached the epidermis of language from the flesh of the linguistic body.”
Berardi searches for ways to reinstate a relation to the sensuality of language, to its place in the body, and more, within the “social body”; in this way, he understands the task of poetry to disentangle social life from the dominance of technocratic competition, of what he calls “mathematical exactitude”, social exhaustion, and debt.