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Akseli Virtanen

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Future Art Base is an autonomous research unit which focuses on radical experimentation and innovation. The idea is to use and experiment with the power of art to create unforseen, unknown or unthinkable (economic, political, social, organizational etc.) processes. We study and develop the bases of such an art, art of imagining and creating a new social future. The production and development of the tools and raw materials needed in the building of the bases of this art – the ideas, concepts, relations, affects, methods, inventions, approaches, networks… – takes place in our experiments. Future Art Base Experiments are like immaterial factories, production lines, to create new combinations of people, economy, art, politics, philosophy, technology, organization, partial components of subjectivities.... The relationship between art and economy, or art and politics, cannot be about content: art expressing views of social resistance or art making things more sellable is not relevant. We think that the common ground of art and politics and art and economy is in the collapse of old forms of life and in the creation of new forms, this is where they meet. Future Art Base Experiments  are a method to bring and hold together many essential but heterogeneous elements. They create new forms, new combinations, paradoxes, monsters that don’t seem to fit the boundaries of normal life, the easy flow of things and action.

 

Robin Hood Minor Asset Management - Investment Cooperative of the Precariat  was established in June 2012 based on a detailed analysis and understanding of the imitative nature of the financial market and to challenge the big banks and their elite asset management business. Robin Hood is a contra-investment bank of the precariat. Our business is minor asset management.

Financialization of economy is a fact which has its origin in the crisis and risks of the industrial form of commodity production and economy. Yet the number of banks in the world has reduced in the last 30 year by 40%. Or that today only 10 big investment banks control over 90% of the entire derivative market whose size is estimated to be around USD 1200-1400 million billions (20-23 x the entire world Gross National Product). During the first 3 months of 2012 alone, the profit of Goldman Sachs was over 2,1 billion dollars, HSBC 6,8 billion dollars (of which investment banking 3,1 billion dollars), JP Morgan 5,4 billion dollars etc. And we know about the scams, interest rate manipulations, unbelievable bonus systems. Even their own employees and directors accuse them of manipulating and exploiting clients for making profit. This is the context of Robin Hood.

Robin Hood is a project where we try to think how could we bend the financialization of capital into the advantage of precarious workers? Could we think of how to transform private profits into shared resources? Could we think of appropriating the means of production financial capital has in its use, and of sharing them, of putting them into work for us? Could we think of a relation to money, not necessarily as tied to capitalism as a historical form of production, but as a means of freedom, escape, and increase of independence? Could we think of profanation finance, of returning its space to common use and play?

And we think we can. Robin Hood is a contra-investment bank: it is a cooperatively owned tactical investment agent for the precarious workers, which addresses the asymmetrical division between those who are able to create money by transforming it into financial capital (to earn money as separate income without work) and those whose only access to money is to work (possibly at any cost) – or first take debt, and then work. Robin Hood is developed as a strategic means to challenge this debt mechanism of control and the limited options the precariat has for financing its living (debt, work and destructive competition of it, wishful thinking, marginal communities “outside” exhange, revolution and taking over government, hoping that the state will take care of you...). Robin Hood offers precarious workers a possibility of income which is not tied to the necessity to work. It is a very concrete reopening of the field of possible.

 

n-1 Publications.  ”n-1” is a concept of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari which refers to a necessity to create new organizational ideas and forms – to which “one” (leader, value, idea, principle) belongs only as subtracted. This is exactly the nature of our series published by n-1 Edições: we don’t organize to make the series, we make the series to organize. To organize at n-1. Just as the publications of the series fold as results of cooperation between brains they also unfold into events – theatrical montages, installations, exhibitions, master classes, dinners between friends… – that go beyond the book-form and reverberate the theoretical and sensitive questions found in each of them. In the series we want to produce more-than-books, object-books which talk you your senses, which you want to touch and which reach beyond the basic media of book. More-than-book triggers multiplicity, n-1, whereby any element aspiring to a position of centrality is subtracted. 

In the series published and coming out next: Félix Guattari: Kafkamachine/Maquinakafka (2011), Heinrich von Kleist: On Marionette Theater (2011), Kuniichi Uno: Genesis of an Unknown Body (2012), David Lapoujade: Powers of Time (2013), Peter Pál Pelbart: Cartography of Exhaustion (2013), Akseli Virtanen: Critique of Biopolitical Economy/Crítica à economia biopolítica (2013), Suely Rolnik: Anthropophagic Unconscious: Between art, politics and clinic (2013), Bracha Ettinger: Co-Poiesis (2014), Franco Berardi: Manifesto for Future Art Base (2014), Jean Claude Polack: Experiências da locura/Experiences of Madness (2014), Maurizio Lazzarato: Sign, Machines, Subjectivities (2014) Jean Oury: Criação e esquizofrenia/Critique and schizophrenia (2014), Eduardo Viveiros de Castro & Alexandre Nodari: From the primitive matriarchy to the society against the state and beyond. Cartography of the anthropophagus descent (2014), Sakari Hänninen: Five lectures on economic theology (2015), Alejandra Riera: Maquettes-without-quality (2015).

 

Mollecular organization studies the functioning of semiocapitalism and develops soft technologies of cooperation, tools for building the impossible communities of abstract work and its performers. Molle is a laboratory of schizoanalysis. We operate in the soft stomach, “il ventre molle“, of arbitrary power. Or more precisely: we are the soft belly of arbitrary power. Mollecular organization is a group of loosers, sad figures, dark souls, cynical opportunists and depressed princesses. We are not tough or macho, we are soft and wet, impotent and feeble. We don’t march or demonstrate. We have difficulties in getting up from the bed.  We are molle people, the future of cooperation.

 

Kafkamachine – a film project studying our life at the mercy of financial economy, crisis of Europe and transformation of politics, based on the project plan by Félix Guattari. Guattari thought that Kafka was nothing less than the future. For him Kafka was not a 19th century writer prisoned in dark family relations and guilt, loneliness, submission to the law, anguish of modern man, but a writer of future in whom all this blows up and strange problems and openings which are only today starting to talk to us begin to emerge. Following Guattari’s project plan, with Kafka we try (1) to map and study our fears, hopes, problems, dreams and existential territories at the mercy of financial economy and arbitrary power; with Kafka we try (2) to develop tools for an “impossible community”, a cooperation not yet there, a cooperation to come. This is the Kafkamachine we want to assemble. The shooting started in December 2012.

 

Aesthetic Dispositive of Semiocapitalism - research group at Academie Schloss Solitude.

Person profile

 

Future Art Base is an autonomous unit which focuses on radical experimentation and innovation. The idea is to use and experiment with the power of art to create unforseen, unknown or unthinkable (economic, political, social, organizational etc.) processes. We study and develop the bases of such an art, art of imagining and creating a new social future, art of reopening the field of possible. The production and development of the tools and raw materials needed in the building of the bases of future art – the ideas, concepts, words, affects, methods, inventions, approaches, networks, relations… – takes place in our experiments. Future Art Base Experiments are like immaterial factories, production lines, to create new combinations of people, economy, art, politics, philosophy, technology, organization, partial components of subjectivities... The relationship between art and economy, or art and politics, cannot be about content: art expressing views of social resistance or art making things more sellable is not relevant. We think that the common ground of art and politics and art and economy is in the collapse of old forms of life and in the creation of new forms, this is where they meet. Future Art Base Experiments  are a method to bring and hold together many essential but heterogeneous elements. They create new forms, new combinations, paradoxes, monsters that don’t seem to fit the boundaries of normal life, the easy flow of things and action.

 

Robin Hood Minor Asset Management - Investment Cooperative of the Precariat  was established in June 2012 based on a detailed analysis and understanding of the imitative nature of the financial market and to challenge the big banks and their elite asset management business. Robin Hood is a contra-investment bank of the precariat. Our business is minor asset management. 

Financialization of economy is a fact which has its origin in the crisis and risks of the industrial form of commodity production and economy. Yet the number of banks in the world has reduced in the last 30 year by 40%. Or that today only 10 big investment banks control over 90% of the entire derivative market whose size is estimated to be around USD 1200-1400 million billions (20-23 x the entire world Gross National Product). During the first 3 months of 2012 alone, the profit of Goldman Sachs was over 2,1 billion dollars, HSBC 6,8 billion dollars (of which investment banking 3,1 billion dollars), JP Morgan 5,4 billion dollars etc. And we know about the scams, interest rate manipulations, unbelievable bonus systems. Even their own employees and directors accuse them of manipulating and exploiting clients for making profit. This is the context of Robin Hood.

Robin Hood is a project where we try to think how could we bend the financialization of capital into the advantage of precarious workers? Could we think of how to transform private profits into shared resources? Could we think of appropriating the means of production financial capital has in its use, and of sharing them, of putting them into work for us? Could we think of a relation to money, not necessarily as tied to capitalism as a historical form of production, but as a means of freedom, escape, and increase of independence? Could we think of profanation finance, of returning its space to common use and play?

And we think we can. Robin Hood is a contra-investment bank: it is a cooperatively owned tactical investment agent for the precarious workers, which addresses the asymmetrical division between those who are able to create money by transforming it into financial capital (to earn money as separate income without work) and those whose only access to money is to work (possibly at any cost) – or first take debt, and then work. Robin Hood is developed as a strategic means to challenge this debt mechanism of control and the limited options the precariat has for financing its living (debt, work and destructive competition of it, wishful thinking, marginal communities “outside” exhange, revolution and taking over government, hoping that the state will take care of you...). Robin Hood offers precarious workers a possibility of income which is not tied to the necessity to work. It is a very concrete reopening of the field of possible.

 

n-1 Publications.  ”n-1” is a concept of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari which refers to a necessity to create new organizational ideas and forms – to which “one” (leader, value, idea, principle) belongs only as subtracted. This is exactly the nature of our series published by n-1 Edições: we don’t organize to make the series, we make the series to organize. To organize at n-1. Just as the publications of the series fold as results of cooperation between brains they also unfold into events – theatrical montages, installations, exhibitions, master classes, dinners between friends… – that go beyond the book-form and reverberate the theoretical and sensitive questions found in each of them. In the series we want to produce more-than-books, object-books which talk you your senses, which you want to touch and which reach beyond the basic media of book. More-than-book triggers multiplicity, n-1, whereby any element aspiring to a position of centrality is subtracted. 

In the series published and coming out next: Félix Guattari: Kafkamachine/Maquinakafka (2011), Heinrich von Kleist: On Marionette Theater (2011), Kuniichi Uno: Genesis of an Unknown Body (2012), David Lapoujade: Powers of Time (2013), Peter Pál Pelbart: Cartography of Exhaustion (2013), Akseli Virtanen: Critique of Biopolitical Economy/Crítica à economia biopolítica (2013), Suely Rolnik: Anthropophagic Unconscious: Between art, politics and clinic (2013), Bracha Ettinger: Co-Poiesis (2014), Franco Berardi: Manifesto for Future Art Base (2014), Jean Claude Polack: Experiências da locura/Experiences of Madness (2014), Maurizio Lazzarato: Sign, Machines, Subjectivities (2014) Jean Oury: Criação e esquizofrenia/Critique and schizophrenia (2014), Eduardo Viveiros de Castro & Alexandre Nodari: From the primitive matriarchy to the society against the state and beyond. Cartography of the anthropophagus descent (2014), Sakari Hänninen: Five lectures on economic theology (2015), Alejandra Riera: Maquettes-without-quality (2015).

 

Mollecular organization studies the functioning of semiocapitalism and develops soft technologies of cooperation, tools for building the impossible communities of abstract work and its performers. Molle is a laboratory of schizoanalysis. We operate in the soft stomach, “il ventre molle“, of arbitrary power. Or more precisely: we are the soft belly of arbitrary power. Mollecular organization is a group of loosers, sad figures, dark souls, cynical opportunists and depressed princesses. We are not tough or macho, we are soft and wet, impotent and feeble. We don’t march or demonstrate. We have difficulties in getting up from the bed.  We are molle people, the future of cooperation.

 

Kafkamachine – a film project studying our life at the mercy of financial economy, crisis of Europe and transformation of politics, based on the project plan by Félix Guattari. Guattari thought that Kafka was nothing less than the future. For him Kafka was not a 19th century writer prisoned in dark family relations and guilt, loneliness, submission to the law, anguish of modern man, but a writer of future in whom all this blows up and strange problems and openings which are only today starting to talk to us begin to emerge. Following Guattari’s project plan, with Kafka we try (1) to map and study our fears, hopes, problems, dreams and existential territories at the mercy of financial economy and arbitrary power; with Kafka we try (2) to develop tools for an “impossible community”, a cooperation not yet there, a cooperation to come. This is the Kafkamachine we want to assemble. The shooting started in December 2012.

Aesthetic Dispositive of Semiocapitalism - research group at Academie Schloss Solitude

 

 

Background

Biopolitical Economy and Arbitrary Power (ongoing)

One of the key questions that has guided my work is the mutation of capitalism and the necessity to create new concepts for understanding economy and its organization. Significant part of my research has traced the mutation of economic formation of value and the capitalist form of production both historically and logically. I have developed concepts such as arbitrary power and biopolitical economy in order to rethink and reconceptualise economy and its organization from the same premise that has lead political philosophy to speak of biopolitics. Why? Because if this premise is the absolute condition for thinking politics today (as Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Hannah Arendt for example have stated), it must be so also for thinking economy - since what is at stake in this premise is the general dissolution of the boundaries between economy and other areas of life. 

Virtanen Akseli (2006)  Biopoliittisen talouden kritiikki. Modernin talouden loppu ja mielivallan synty  [A Critique of Biopolical Economy. The End of Modern Economy and the Birth of Arbitrary Power]. Tutkijaliitto, Polemos-series, Helsinki. 278 pages.  The book is published in English as Critique of Biopolitical Economy and in Portuguese as Crítica da Economia Biopolitica in 2013 by n-1 Edições.

Virtanen Akseli (2010) Immaterial as Material, TkH: Journal for the Theory of Performing Arts, 4/2010.

Berardi Franco & Akseli Virtanen (2010) Mielivallasta morfogeneesiin [From Arbitrary Power to Morphogenesis]. Niin & näin, 3/2010.

Virtanen Akseli (2008) Arbitrary Power. Or on Organization without End. In The Swedish Dance History. Inpex, Stockholm. pp 177-195.

Vähämäki Jussi & Akseli Virtanen (2006) Deleuze, change, history. In Fuglsang & Sorenssen (eds.) Gilles Deleuze and the Social: Towards a New Social Analytic. Edinburgh University Press.

Virtanen Akseli (2006), Entries “Taloudellinen elämä [Economic life]” pp. 125-129, “Markkinatunnelma [Market sentiment]” pp. 213-220, “Biopoliittinen talous [Biopolitical economy]”  pp. 221-234, and “Mielivalta [Arbitrary power]” pp. 465-481 in Uuden työn sanakirja [The Dictionary of New Work]. Tutkijaliitto, Helsinki.

Virtanen Akseli ed. (2005) Permanent Transience: The Structure of Change. Special Issue. Framework. The Finnish Art Review 4/2005: 1-136.

Virtanen Akseli & Steffen Böhm eds. (2005) Web of Capturing the Moving Mind. Issue X. Ephemera. Theory and Politics in Organization 5(X): 662-795.

Virtanen Akseli & Jussi Vähämäki eds. (2004) Theory of the Multitude. Special issue. Ephemera. Theory and Politics in Organization 4(3): 177-308.

Virtanen Akseli & Jussi Vähämäki (2005), Ontology. In Jones C. (ed.) Manifestos for the Business School of Tomorrow. Dvalin, Stockholm. pp.105-113.

Virtanen Akseli (2004), General Economy. The Entrance of Multitude into Production. Ephemera. Theory and Politics in Organization 4(3): 209-232.

 

 

Economy and Social Theory (2002-2014)

This project provided a comprehensive study and articulation of the ways that economy has been thought in different social theoretical and philosophical traditions and how the equation economy-politics-society has been solved in them. The simple aim of the project was to underline that economy has a history. Economy has not always been what we today understand with it, it has not always functioned with the same principles and means and its place in society has not always been what it is today. That is why also changes in the future are likely, even if the rhetoric of the economical necessities – used at the moment, for example, in the current economical crisis of Europe – seduces one to think otherwise. On the contrary, in this lack of options and “there is no other way” there is something essential of the logic with which economy functions in the era of floating values and continuous state of emergency and with which it forces us to believe in the a-historicity of a certain form of production.

Risto Heiskala & Akseli Virtanen (eds.): Talous ja yhteiskuntateoria [Economy and Social Theory]. Helsinki: Gaudeamus 2011- 2014.

Vol 1. (2011) “Economy in the Old World and Great Transformation” deals with ways economy was thought in stateless societies and antiquity, Islamic society, Midle Ages Mercantilism etc. before the great transformation and the ways anticipating it and breaking and replacing the old moral-political structure of the world with new thinking and means organized around the centrality of economy.

Vol 2.  (2013) “Economy in the Modern World and its Critique” deals with the economy of the modern world and its different critiques in a situation where the great transformation is over in the sense that economy is now thought as its own sphere of reality and the center of the organization of society. And this both in economic and social theory: from Neoclassical economics to Keynes, Schumpeter and Neoinstitutional economics, from Weber, Simmel, Veblen to consumer research, Frankfurt School, Rawls and Post-colonial theory…)

Vol 3. (2014) “Towards New Political Economy” tries to think about approaches to economy (e.g. Derrida, Nancy, Foucault, Deleuze, Zizek, Heidegger, Bataille, Baudrillard, C. Schmitt, Tarde, Negri, feminist economics) with which we could perhaps start to understand the new great transformation, that is, the situation where economy has began to unfold over its modern boundaries, methods and rationality (as articulated in the Vol 2) and become again general economy, or “political economy” in the original sense of the syntagma: economy as general management of life and society.

 

Cartography of New Work (2004-2006)

This research project started immediately after the initial two-year long Economy and Social Theory lecture series, as its next step, to deal specifically with the displacement into knowledge and attention economy, or into immaterial labour and production, which we thought received still too little attention of the Economy and Social theory project: the paradoxes of new work and immaterial production could not be understood with the concepts of modern sociology, economics, management theory or political theory.  By these paradoxes I mean for example the strange condition where I am expected to put into work more and more of my “soul” – my thoughts, tastes, emotions, memories, relations – while at the same time the magic of work, the security and predictability it once offered, has lost all its credibility. I, for example, a pretty educated, yet not so young Dr.Sc.(Econ.) anymore, have never had a longer than one 3 year employment relationship, while most of them, if I have had any, have always been cut in six month deals after another. And still I and my family feel that I only work. To understand the transformation of work and production we need concepts which go beyond the industrial welfare and wage work society.

There is no doubt that the paradoxes biopolitical economy cause problems to the old meanings, distinctions and approaches as if it did not fit within the boundaries of normal world and common opinion. In economy where value is produced by action rather than work, by words and images rather than machines, where products are “communicative acts” rather than actual material things and where tools blend in human abilities and memory, it no longer makes sense to use concepts that separate “economy” and “life”, “management” and “philosophy” (or words and things, action and work, spirit and matter, mind and body, subject and object) at the very moment when the analysis of economy ought to combine them. The understanding of the dynamic of the creation of value and its control requires new conceptual openings, new tools of thinking, new theory of economy, new philosophy of management.

Mikko Jakonen, Jukka Peltokoski, Akseli Virtanen (eds.) Uuden työn sanakirja [The Dictionary of New Work]. Helsinki: Tutkijaliitto 2006, Polemos-series, 500 p.

General Intellect: Vasemmisto etsii työtä. Helsinki: Like Publishing 2008.

 

Mental Ecology in Cognitive Capitalism - a Félix Guattari Master Class (2007-2010)

Economy does not function only through exchange values, monetary values, but also through mechanisms of subjectivation. They are the most important means of organization of the accumulation in a biopolitical economy where our abilities to understand and learn, to feel and create meanings and to relate to the presence of others have replaced direct labour and machines as the central forces of production. Economy has become production of subjectivity. It is a “productive-economic-subjective” compound as Félix Guattari says. We are ourselves integral organs to the functioning of this compound: our feelings, perceptions, hopes, desires and imaginary ghosts are not something separate but integral components of the functioning of economy. This transfer of the mechanisms of production of value into our mental environment is far more important to the analysis of our psyche than the mother relationship or family. This is what Deleuze and Guattari meant in their famous analysis in L’Anti-Oedipe: desire is social, capitalism is about the appropriation of desiring production. This thesis as a starting point, we wanted to study in detail the relationship between the functioning of cognitive and affective forms valorization and the subjectivity we were experiencing.

The project organized three series of international workshops to map how the mechanisms of production of value have spread into our mental and social environments: the ecological disequilibrium of our mental environments (precarious states of mind, panic and depression as a forms of life, the erosion of subjectivity and its foundations etc.) were like an organ of the mutation of capitalism where the structures and risks of production have spread into structures of subjectivity, meaning, desire and relationships.

The project was called (following Félix Guattari) a project on “mental ecology”, because the question of the ecology of these regions – the question of the future and environments of the incorporeal species of ideas, feelings, states of mind and modes of cooperation – is as pressing a problem as is the ecology of the natural world. The problem is not only something “external” to us, but resides already “inside” us, in our hearts and minds, in our friends and modes of cooperation.

Félix Guattari: Kolme ekologiaa [Three Ecologies]. Helsinki: Tutkijaliitto 2008.

Félix Guattari: Kaaosmoosi [Chaosmosis]. Helsinki: Tutkijaliitto 2010.

Bracha Ettinger: Yhdessätuotanto [Co-poiesis]. Helsinki: Tutkijaliitto 2009.

Bracha Ettinger: Fragilization and Resistance Exhibition, The Finnish Academy of Fine Arts 21-30.8.2009. Curated by Akseli Virtanen and Tero Nauha.

Virtanen Akseli (2009): Johdanto Bracha Ettingerin yhdessätuotantoon [Introduction to Bracha Ettinger’s co-poiesis].  Aivojen yhteistyön muistivihkot, Helsinki. 57 p.

Virtanen Akseli & Tero Nauha eds. (2009): Bracha Ettinger: Fragilization and Resistance. Exhibition catalogue, The Finnish Academy of Fine Arts. Aivojen yhteistyön muistivihkot, Helsinki. 137 p.

Butler Judith (2009) Brachan työstä - On Bracha’s Work. Limited edition. Edited by Akseli Virtanen. Aivojen yhteistyön muistivihkot, Helsinki. 59 p.

 

Exhausted Subject, Impossible Community (ongoing)

What are the organizational and political consequences of our “mental ecology”? The aim of this project has been to study the difficulties of cooperation of precarious workers and to create tools for the “impossible community” of immaterial labour and its performers. Taking the “discreet charm” of the precariat or call it the “dark side” of the multitude, the depression, panic, impotence, continuous micro-catastrophes of cooperation and the easiness of turning all the potential in cooperation into vicious violence between friends as its starting point, the project has tried to think and develop a basis for a positive organization of cooperation.

How to connect with others without the preconditions of a community, the spatial proximity and temporal continuity of existence? How to connect with others when the pathos of distance, cynicism and opportunism, have become essential parts of our survival? How can art work with that which cannot be said, and perhaps create compassionate spaces of connection and copoiesis? What kind of tools do philosophy, political theory and artworking offer for escaping the self-evidencies and patterns of behaviour through which the preemptive controls work in us – for co-creating mutation of subjectivity, resistance at the “molecular level”?

What is a community of the depressed? How do opportunists and cynics cooperate? The traditional organizational and political thought has always considered these states of mind dangerous, because it is impossible to control people who are not interested in anything, who do not commit to common task, who don’t keep their promises, have no clear direction, purpose, or consistency in their action or who just pretend to participate. It is precisely here where the classical methods of politics and organization face today their limit: they face the pathos of distance, human subjectivity without any particular direction or task, apathetic, indifferent and possessing a paradoxical immunity to any meaningful attempts of organization. But perhaps it is this very instability, ambivalence, a kind of distance or indifference on which any serious thinking of organization of cooperation should today start. Or as Nietzsche says (Genealogy of Morals, I §2): “From this pathos of distance they first arrogated to themselves the right to create values”. Could we think that Guattari’s “pathic foyer” of subjectivity is also a-pathic? That is, interpreted positively as restlessness or indifference to what is calculated to move feelings, to excite interest and action and that perhaps it is in this autonomy, untouchability or indifference (to all attempts to direct and organize behavior and thinking), that we should start looking for the possibility of creation and cooperation – not chaos but the essence of becoming that gives us consistency and that is necessary for creation.

The Ueinzz Theatre Company: Finnegans Ueinzz performance, Baltic Circle Theatre Festival 18-22.11.2009.

Kafkamachine, a film by Kafka. Organizational and cinematrographic experiment based on Franz Kafka’s novel America, on the Trans-Atlantic ship from Lisbon to Sao Paulo 23.11-13.12.2011.

Peter Pál Pelbart: “Cartography of Exhaustion” audio book, available at www.mollecular.org

Virtanen Akseli (2011) The Discreet Charm of the Precariat. In Félix Guattari: Kafkamachine. Future Art Base, Series edited by Akseli Virtanen and Peter Pál Pelbart. n-1 edições, São Paulo.

Virtanen Akseli (2011): Matriisinen subjektiviteetti [Matrixial Subjectivity]. Special Issue on Bracha Ettinger. Essays by Bracha Ettinger, Judith Butler, Juhani Ihanus, Akseli Virtanen. Psykoterapia 2/2011.

Virtanen Akseli (2011) Todellinen ongelma. Yhdessätuotanto ja Bracha Ettingerin käsitteet [A Real Problem. Copoiesis and Bracha Ettinger’s Concepts]. Psykoterapia 2/2011:116-136.

Ettinger Bracha & Akseli Virtanen (2011), Mikä antaa meille elämää? [What Gives us Life?] Psykoterapia 2/2011:169-187.

Félix Guattari (2011) Kafkamachine/Maquinakafka. Edited by Akseli Virtanen and Peter Pál Pelbart. Future Art Base Series, n-1 Edições, São Paulo. 134 p.

 

 

Polemos book series, by Tutkijaliitto (2006-2012)

We started the Polemos series to create a new language and sense to our experience of biopolitical economy to which the existing concepts and approaches did not seem to talk anymore. The concepts and openings introduced in the series looked at first perhaps exceptional or even extravagant. Yet concepts such as immaterial labor, multitude, mental ecology, precariat, basic income, semiocapitalism, feminization of work, attention economy, copoiesis, cognitariat, arbitrary power were mapping the already changed social and political territory on which we are standing. The series tried to find words for things which existed, but which were still lacking them. It tried to build a new language and sense to our experience. Polemos (Gr. war, battle) is a means of creation. It is a creator of ideas and cooperation, their father and king, as Herakleitos said, others it makes Gods and others men, others it makes slaves, others free. The titles in the series include:

Christian Marazzi: Pääoma ja kieli [Capitale & linguaggio] 2006

Akseli Virtanen: Biopoliittisen talouden kritiikki [Critique of Biopolitical Economy] 2006

Maurizio Lazzarato: Kapitalismin vallankumoukset  [Les revolutions du capitalisme] 2006

Jakonen-Peltokoski-Virtanen (eds.): Uuden työn sanakirja [Dictionary of New Work] 2006

Paolo Virno: Väen kielioppi [Grammatica della moltitudine] 2006

Franco Berardi: Tietotyö ja prekaari mielentila [Infolabour and precarious states of mind] 2006

Jean Baudrillard: Terrorismin henki [L’esprit du terrorisme] 2007

General Intellect: Vasemmisto etsii työtä [Left without work] 2008

Anna Kontula: Punainen eksodus [Red Exodus] 2008

Jussi Vähämäki: Itsen alistus [Submission of Self] 2009

Félix Guattari: Kolme ekologiaa [Les trois écologies] 2008

Bracha Ettinger: Yhdessätuotanto [Copoiesis] 2009

Félix Guattari: Kaaosmoosi [Chaosmose] 2010

Pekka Piironen: Epävarmuuden talous [Economy of Insecurity] 2012

 

Background

Biopolitical Economy and Arbitrary Power (ongoing)

One of the key questions that has guided my work is the mutation of capitalism and the necessity to create new concepts for understanding economy and its organization. Significant part of my research has traced the mutation of economic formation of value and the capitalist form of production both historically and logically. I have developed concepts such as arbitrary power and biopolitical economy in order to rethink and reconceptualise economy and its organization from the same premise that has lead political philosophy to speak of biopolitics. Why? Because if this premise is the absolute condition for thinking politics today (as Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Hannah Arendt for example have stated), it must be so also for thinking economy - since what is at stake in this premise is the general dissolution of the boundaries between economy and other areas of life. 

Virtanen Akseli (2006)  Biopoliittisen talouden kritiikki. Modernin talouden loppu ja mielivallan synty  [A Critique of Biopolical Economy. The End of Modern Economy and the Birth of Arbitrary Power]. Tutkijaliitto, Polemos-series, Helsinki. 278 pages.  The book is published in English as Critique of Biopolitical Economy and in Portuguese as Crítica da Economia Biopolitica in 2013 by n-1 Edições.

Virtanen Akseli (2010) Immaterial as Material, TkH: Journal for the Theory of Performing Arts, 4/2010.

Berardi Franco & Akseli Virtanen (2010) Mielivallasta morfogeneesiin [From Arbitrary Power to Morphogenesis]. Niin & näin, 3/2010.

Virtanen Akseli (2008) Arbitrary Power. Or on Organization without End. In The Swedish Dance History. Inpex, Stockholm. pp 177-195.

Vähämäki Jussi & Akseli Virtanen (2006) Deleuze, change, history. In Fuglsang & Sorenssen (eds.) Gilles Deleuze and the Social: Towards a New Social Analytic. Edinburgh University Press.

Virtanen Akseli (2006), Entries “Taloudellinen elämä [Economic life]” pp. 125-129, “Markkinatunnelma [Market sentiment]” pp. 213-220, “Biopoliittinen talous [Biopolitical economy]”  pp. 221-234, and “Mielivalta [Arbitrary power]” pp. 465-481 in Uuden työn sanakirja [The Dictionary of New Work]. Tutkijaliitto, Helsinki.

Virtanen Akseli ed. (2005) Permanent Transience: The Structure of Change. Special Issue. Framework. The Finnish Art Review 4/2005: 1-136.

Virtanen Akseli & Steffen Böhm eds. (2005) Web of Capturing the Moving Mind. Issue X. Ephemera. Theory and Politics in Organization 5(X): 662-795.

Virtanen Akseli & Jussi Vähämäki eds. (2004) Theory of the Multitude. Special issue. Ephemera. Theory and Politics in Organization 4(3): 177-308.

Virtanen Akseli & Jussi Vähämäki (2005), Ontology. In Jones C. (ed.) Manifestos for the Business School of Tomorrow. Dvalin, Stockholm. pp.105-113.

Virtanen Akseli (2004), General Economy. The Entrance of Multitude into Production. Ephemera. Theory and Politics in Organization 4(3): 209-232.

 

 

Economy and Social Theory (2002-2014)

This project provided a comprehensive study and articulation of the ways that economy has been thought in different social theoretical and philosophical traditions and how the equation economy-politics-society has been solved in them. The simple aim of the project was to underline that economy has a history. Economy has not always been what we today understand with it, it has not always functioned with the same principles and means and its place in society has not always been what it is today. That is why also changes in the future are likely, even if the rhetoric of the economical necessities – used at the moment, for example, in the current economical crisis of Europe – seduces one to think otherwise. On the contrary, in this lack of options and “there is no other way” there is something essential of the logic with which economy functions in the era of floating values and continuous state of emergency and with which it forces us to believe in the a-historicity of a certain form of production.

Risto Heiskala & Akseli Virtanen (eds.): Talous ja yhteiskuntateoria [Economy and Social Theory]. Helsinki: Gaudeamus 2011- 2014.

Vol 1. (2011) “Economy in the Old World and Great Transformation” deals with ways economy was thought in stateless societies and antiquity, Islamic society, Midle Ages Mercantilism etc. before the great transformation and the ways anticipating it and breaking and replacing the old moral-political structure of the world with new thinking and means organized around the centrality of economy.

Vol 2.  (2013) “Economy in the Modern World and its Critique” deals with the economy of the modern world and its different critiques in a situation where the great transformation is over in the sense that economy is now thought as its own sphere of reality and the center of the organization of society. And this both in economic and social theory: from Neoclassical economics to Keynes, Schumpeter and Neoinstitutional economics, from Weber, Simmel, Veblen to consumer research, Frankfurt School, Rawls and Post-colonial theory…)

Vol 3. (2014) “Towards New Political Economy” tries to think about approaches to economy (e.g. Derrida, Nancy, Foucault, Deleuze, Zizek, Heidegger, Bataille, Baudrillard, C. Schmitt, Tarde, Negri, feminist economics) with which we could perhaps start to understand the new great transformation, that is, the situation where economy has began to unfold over its modern boundaries, methods and rationality (as articulated in the Vol 2) and become again general economy, or “political economy” in the original sense of the syntagma: economy as general management of life and society.

 

Cartography of New Work (2004-2006)

This research project started immediately after the initial two-year long Economy and Social Theory lecture series, as its next step, to deal specifically with the displacement into knowledge and attention economy, or into immaterial labour and production, which we thought received still too little attention of the Economy and Social theory project: the paradoxes of new work and immaterial production could not be understood with the concepts of modern sociology, economics, management theory or political theory.  By these paradoxes I mean for example the strange condition where I am expected to put into work more and more of my “soul” – my thoughts, tastes, emotions, memories, relations – while at the same time the magic of work, the security and predictability it once offered, has lost all its credibility. I, for example, a pretty educated, yet not so young Dr.Sc.(Econ.) anymore, have never had a longer than one 3 year employment relationship, while most of them, if I have had any, have always been cut in six month deals after another. And still I and my family feel that I only work. To understand the transformation of work and production we need concepts which go beyond the industrial welfare and wage work society.

There is no doubt that the paradoxes biopolitical economy cause problems to the old meanings, distinctions and approaches as if it did not fit within the boundaries of normal world and common opinion. In economy where value is produced by action rather than work, by words and images rather than machines, where products are “communicative acts” rather than actual material things and where tools blend in human abilities and memory, it no longer makes sense to use concepts that separate “economy” and “life”, “management” and “philosophy” (or words and things, action and work, spirit and matter, mind and body, subject and object) at the very moment when the analysis of economy ought to combine them. The understanding of the dynamic of the creation of value and its control requires new conceptual openings, new tools of thinking, new theory of economy, new philosophy of management.

Mikko Jakonen, Jukka Peltokoski, Akseli Virtanen (eds.) Uuden työn sanakirja [The Dictionary of New Work]. Helsinki: Tutkijaliitto 2006, Polemos-series, 500 p.

General Intellect: Vasemmisto etsii työtä. Helsinki: Like Publishing 2008.

 

Mental Ecology in Cognitive Capitalism - a Félix Guattari Master Class (2007-2010)

Economy does not function only through exchange values, monetary values, but also through mechanisms of subjectivation. They are the most important means of organization of the accumulation in a biopolitical economy where our abilities to understand and learn, to feel and create meanings and to relate to the presence of others have replaced direct labour and machines as the central forces of production. Economy has become production of subjectivity. It is a “productive-economic-subjective” compound as Félix Guattari says. We are ourselves integral organs to the functioning of this compound: our feelings, perceptions, hopes, desires and imaginary ghosts are not something separate but integral components of the functioning of economy. This transfer of the mechanisms of production of value into our mental environment is far more important to the analysis of our psyche than the mother relationship or family. This is what Deleuze and Guattari meant in their famous analysis in L’Anti-Oedipe: desire is social, capitalism is about the appropriation of desiring production. This thesis as a starting point, we wanted to study in detail the relationship between the functioning of cognitive and affective forms valorization and the subjectivity we were experiencing.

The project organized three series of international workshops to map how the mechanisms of production of value have spread into our mental and social environments: the ecological disequilibrium of our mental environments (precarious states of mind, panic and depression as a forms of life, the erosion of subjectivity and its foundations etc.) were like an organ of the mutation of capitalism where the structures and risks of production have spread into structures of subjectivity, meaning, desire and relationships.

The project was called (following Félix Guattari) a project on “mental ecology”, because the question of the ecology of these regions – the question of the future and environments of the incorporeal species of ideas, feelings, states of mind and modes of cooperation – is as pressing a problem as is the ecology of the natural world. The problem is not only something “external” to us, but resides already “inside” us, in our hearts and minds, in our friends and modes of cooperation.

Félix Guattari: Kolme ekologiaa [Three Ecologies]. Helsinki: Tutkijaliitto 2008.

Félix Guattari: Kaaosmoosi [Chaosmosis]. Helsinki: Tutkijaliitto 2010.

Bracha Ettinger: Yhdessätuotanto [Co-poiesis]. Helsinki: Tutkijaliitto 2009.

Bracha Ettinger: Fragilization and Resistance Exhibition, The Finnish Academy of Fine Arts 21-30.8.2009. Curated by Akseli Virtanen and Tero Nauha.

Virtanen Akseli (2009): Johdanto Bracha Ettingerin yhdessätuotantoon [Introduction to Bracha Ettinger’s co-poiesis].  Aivojen yhteistyön muistivihkot, Helsinki. 57 p.

Virtanen Akseli & Tero Nauha eds. (2009): Bracha Ettinger: Fragilization and Resistance. Exhibition catalogue, The Finnish Academy of Fine Arts. Aivojen yhteistyön muistivihkot, Helsinki. 137 p.

Butler Judith (2009) Brachan työstä - On Bracha’s Work. Limited edition. Edited by Akseli Virtanen. Aivojen yhteistyön muistivihkot, Helsinki. 59 p.

 

Exhausted Subject, Impossible Community (ongoing)

What are the organizational and political consequences of our “mental ecology”? The aim of this project has been to study the difficulties of cooperation of precarious workers and to create tools for the “impossible community” of immaterial labour and its performers. Taking the “discreet charm” of the precariat or call it the “dark side” of the multitude, the depression, panic, impotence, continuous micro-catastrophes of cooperation and the easiness of turning all the potential in cooperation into vicious violence between friends as its starting point, the project has tried to think and develop a basis for a positive organization of cooperation.

How to connect with others without the preconditions of a community, the spatial proximity and temporal continuity of existence? How to connect with others when the pathos of distance, cynicism and opportunism, have become essential parts of our survival? How can art work with that which cannot be said, and perhaps create compassionate spaces of connection and copoiesis? What kind of tools do philosophy, political theory and artworking offer for escaping the self-evidencies and patterns of behaviour through which the preemptive controls work in us – for co-creating mutation of subjectivity, resistance at the “molecular level”?

What is a community of the depressed? How do opportunists and cynics cooperate? The traditional organizational and political thought has always considered these states of mind dangerous, because it is impossible to control people who are not interested in anything, who do not commit to common task, who don’t keep their promises, have no clear direction, purpose, or consistency in their action or who just pretend to participate. It is precisely here where the classical methods of politics and organization face today their limit: they face the pathos of distance, human subjectivity without any particular direction or task, apathetic, indifferent and possessing a paradoxical immunity to any meaningful attempts of organization. But perhaps it is this very instability, ambivalence, a kind of distance or indifference on which any serious thinking of organization of cooperation should today start. Or as Nietzsche says (Genealogy of Morals, I §2): “From this pathos of distance they first arrogated to themselves the right to create values”. Could we think that Guattari’s “pathic foyer” of subjectivity is also a-pathic? That is, interpreted positively as restlessness or indifference to what is calculated to move feelings, to excite interest and action and that perhaps it is in this autonomy, untouchability or indifference (to all attempts to direct and organize behavior and thinking), that we should start looking for the possibility of creation and cooperation – not chaos but the essence of becoming that gives us consistency and that is necessary for creation.

The Ueinzz Theatre Company: Finnegans Ueinzz performance, Baltic Circle Theatre Festival 18-22.11.2009.

Kafkamachine, a film by Kafka. Organizational and cinematrographic experiment based on Franz Kafka’s novel America, on the Trans-Atlantic ship from Lisbon to Sao Paulo 23.11-13.12.2011.

Peter Pál Pelbart: “Cartography of Exhaustion” audio book, available at www.mollecular.org

Virtanen Akseli (2011) The Discreet Charm of the Precariat. In Félix Guattari: Kafkamachine. Future Art Base, Series edited by Akseli Virtanen and Peter Pál Pelbart. n-1 edições, São Paulo.

Virtanen Akseli (2011): Matriisinen subjektiviteetti [Matrixial Subjectivity]. Special Issue on Bracha Ettinger. Essays by Bracha Ettinger, Judith Butler, Juhani Ihanus, Akseli Virtanen. Psykoterapia 2/2011.

Virtanen Akseli (2011) Todellinen ongelma. Yhdessätuotanto ja Bracha Ettingerin käsitteet [A Real Problem. Copoiesis and Bracha Ettinger’s Concepts]. Psykoterapia 2/2011:116-136.

Ettinger Bracha & Akseli Virtanen (2011), Mikä antaa meille elämää? [What Gives us Life?] Psykoterapia 2/2011:169-187.

Félix Guattari (2011) Kafkamachine/Maquinakafka. Edited by Akseli Virtanen and Peter Pál Pelbart. Future Art Base Series, n-1 Edições, São Paulo. 134 p.

 

 

Polemos book series, by Tutkijaliitto (2006-2012)

We started the Polemos series to create a new language and sense to our experience of biopolitical economy to which the existing concepts and approaches did not seem to talk anymore. The concepts and openings introduced in the series looked at first perhaps exceptional or even extravagant. Yet concepts such as immaterial labor, multitude, mental ecology, precariat, basic income, semiocapitalism, feminization of work, attention economy, copoiesis, cognitariat, arbitrary power were mapping the already changed social and political territory on which we are standing. The series tried to find words for things which existed, but which were still lacking them. It tried to build a new language and sense to our experience. Polemos (Gr. war, battle) is a means of creation. It is a creator of ideas and cooperation, their father and king, as Herakleitos said, others it makes Gods and others men, others it makes slaves, others free. The titles in the series include:

Christian Marazzi: Pääoma ja kieli [Capitale & linguaggio] 2006

Akseli Virtanen: Biopoliittisen talouden kritiikki [Critique of Biopolitical Economy] 2006

Maurizio Lazzarato: Kapitalismin vallankumoukset  [Les revolutions du capitalisme] 2006

Jakonen-Peltokoski-Virtanen (eds.): Uuden työn sanakirja [Dictionary of New Work] 2006

Paolo Virno: Väen kielioppi [Grammatica della moltitudine] 2006

Franco Berardi: Tietotyö ja prekaari mielentila [Infolabour and precarious states of mind] 2006

Jean Baudrillard: Terrorismin henki [L’esprit du terrorisme] 2007

General Intellect: Vasemmisto etsii työtä [Left without work] 2008

Anna Kontula: Punainen eksodus [Red Exodus] 2008

Jussi Vähämäki: Itsen alistus [Submission of Self] 2009

Félix Guattari: Kolme ekologiaa [Les trois écologies] 2008

Bracha Ettinger: Yhdessätuotanto [Copoiesis] 2009

Félix Guattari: Kaaosmoosi [Chaosmose] 2010

Pekka Piironen: Epävarmuuden talous [Economy of Insecurity] 2012

 

Keywords

New political economy
Economy and social theory
Semiocapitalism
Biopolitical economy
Immaterial labour
Philosophy of organization
Félix Guattari
Gilles Deleuze
Michel Foucault
Giorgio Agamben
Financial market
Bracha Ettinger
Arbitrary power

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