Co-Founder, Economic Space Agency, San Francisco - Berlin - Helsinki DSc(Econ.), Associate Professor (Docent), Aalto University, Helsinki Family with three boys @econaut6 akseli.eth Special session on the ECSA economic paper at MIT, March 2020. Photos courtesy of MIT. BIO I am a radical political economist and finance theorist working with programmable economy: the economy and its key conventions as my design space. Based in Helsinki & Berlin. Five last years before Covid (2014-2019) in California, a visiting researcher at UCSC/History of Consciousness and Stanford University/School of Engineering, working to understand the changing nature of wealth in the digitally mediated society and to reengineer financial instruments to reflect the capabilities of the new software. Hardcore research background, nine books on the history and the future of economic conventions, subjectivity and finance. DSc (Econ.) 2006, Associate Professor (Docent) 2012, Helsinki School of Economics (Aalto University, Helsinki). Main focus at the moment: Economic Space Agency, a 21st century economic technology and imagination company. Motto: The economy is a place of creation. The economy is about to experience similar experimentation with its form, as art already has. Forms of economy will become a poetic experience.

ECSA ECONOMIC IDEAS Akseli Virtanen Translated by Janna Jalkanen Greenhill [An Excerpt from Arbitrary Power. Towards a Critique of Biopolitical Economy (Tutkijaliitto, Helsinki 2006.] Marx’s “Fragment on Machines”, which is the logical culmination of the Economic Manuscripts 1857-1858 or the so called Grundrisse, expounds on the “natural development” of capitalism where the labor that produces material objects and even the working class itself will be displaced from the core of the production of wealth. (352) The evolution of capital will proceed to its “final phase” because capital itself, instead of the working class, causes a change in the nature of the production of value – a change that will lead to the dismantlement of the organization of production based on exchange value. According to Marx, the reason for this change is that abstract knowledge and thinking become immediate productive power. They will replace direct labor and its fragmented and monotonously repetitive tasks, or industrial labor and the society based on division of labor in the traditional sense.

An interview with Akseli Virtanen image Originally published in Geert Lovink (ed.): Money Lab Reader: An Intervention in Digital Economy. Amsterdam: INC Publications 2015. Pekka Piironen: What is Robin Hood? Akseli Virtanen: Robin Hood is an asset management cooperative we established in June 2012. It is a counter-investment bank of the precariat, which is rethinking means of finance and financial services. We are bending the financialization of economy to our benefit. Robin Hood is the power and imagination to do this. Pekka: How do you do it?

We started the Polemos series (at Tutkijaliitto publishing house) 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, among others: 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

Cryptoeconomy is not just another tech sector. It is a different way of doing the economy. The economic space we need to discuss in relation to the cryptoeconomy is nothing short of imaging and engineering an alternative, post-capitalist mode of organizing and calculating that sits in parallel with the conventionally-conceived economy. That’s a big claim. It announces new economic possibilities that, while not entirely novel in their vision, are wildly new in the conception of their reach and mode of organization. The rise of joint stock company and stock markets in 1840s transformed capitalism. A whole new mode of production, capture and distribution of value was born. I think we are now at a turning point of similar significance. The new network technologies will produce a radically different economy. How value is created, captured and distributed, what is money, how people relate to production, are changing as radically as the first generation internet changed the way we communicate and relate to the presence of others in our social communication. Here is some of our recent thinking: Accounting is already a distributed protocol An expanded ledger grammar for encoding and communicating our economic realities Reciprocal stakeholding: a new economic networking primitive Collaborative Finance - An ECSA View Cryptocurrencies as Units of Account: Genetically Reengineering the Economy Economic Space TV: ECSA economic white paper introduction ECSA Token is alive / ECSA Network is launched Decolonization of Money

WHAT IS A STATEMENT (énoncé)? Akseli Virtanen Translated by Janna Jalkanen Greenhill, January 2006 The form of expression is precisely what Michel Foucault aims at with his specific technical term, statement (énoncé). For example, Foucault uses the entire exhausting second part of the Archaeology of Knowledge to prove that statement is not a sentence (which belongs to text and is determined by the laws of language), not a proposition (which belongs to the more general argument and is determined by the laws of logic); it is not a speech act, it is not even a unit or an atom of discourse. Instead, according to Foucault, statement is a function: it is a function that has acquired a specific form – or the act of formation of a particular function – which operates “transversally” in relation to these linguistic elements that it makes appear in a particular form in time and space, and in which it incarnates. If statement can be distinguished from words, sentences, and propositions, it is because statement contains its own object, subject, and aim in the form of “derivations”: the subject, object and aim are only functions that have been derived from the statement. Statement is neither entirely linguistic nor exclusively material. It is nevertheless irreplaceable, if we wish to be able to say that such and such sentence is true, acceptable, and interpretable, or that this or that proposition is legitimate, or that a speech act took place. This means that statement is not so much a linguistic element among others, but, as we have already said, a function that operates transversally in relation to these units.(229) The concept of statement , which cuts diagonally through various elements, is thus in no way a structure, that is, a group of interrelations between variables that enables a potentially infinite number of concrete models. Rather, it is a score – “closer to music than to the system of signification”. (230)

One of the key questions that has guided my work - and is also behind the ECSA-project - 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, semiocapital and biopolitical economy in order to rethink and conceptualize economy and its organization from the same premise that has led 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. RELATED PUBLICATIONS 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 Arbitrary power. Towards a Critique of Biopolitical Economy and in Portuguese as Crítica da Economia Biopolitica by n-1 Edições. Virtanen Akseli (2006) General Intellect Virtanen Akseli (2006) Oikos, polis, nomos

ECSA ECONOMIC IDEAS Akseli Virtanen Translated by Janna Jalkanen Greenhill According to Felix Guattari, signification can either be accepted de jure, as an inevitable effect excepted to be found at every semiotic level, or it can be accepted de facto, as a part of particular system of social organization. (188) In other words, signification does not just fall from the heavens, emerge directly from symbolic structures, from language itself, from the mathematics of the unconscious, or from some mystical semantic womb, but is inseparable from the form of organization and control of the society. In his attempt to elucidate the connection between signification and subjectivation and forms of social organization and control, Guattari emphasized Hjelmslev’s distinction between thought-matter and the formation of semiotic substances. According to Guattari, as far as the distinction between the forming matter and the semiotically (significationally) formed substance takes place regardless of the relation between expression and content, it opens for semiotics a way out of the control based on and enabled by the bipolarity of the signifier and the signified. He thought that “institutional semiotics” should be liberated from the sphere of this linguistic dichotomy of expression/content so that it could encompass for instance the domains of biology, technology, aesthetics and organization which are not only linguistic and human, but also part of the formation of the subject. This would open a possibility of a semiotics that would be independent from the semiology of signification, needed in the institutional situation. It would not be based in the bipolarity of the signifier and the signified; instead, it would open up a possibility both to examine the production of significations as a form of control and organization of subjectivity and to outline a “machinic consistency” that functions without the mediation of signification. (189)

ECSA ECONOMIC IDEAS HOW TO GOVERN WITHOUT MEANING? Franco Berardi & Akseli Virtanen [Originally published in the philosophical journal Niin & Näin (3/2010) - in the middle of the European finanancial crises when the European Central Bank was forcing Greece on her knees. Translated by Janna Jalkanen-Greenhill] Goverment is the keyword of the European construction. Pure functionality without meaning. Government without any reason or end that could be distinguished from it. What does it mean? Automation of thought and will. Embedding abstract connections in the relations between living organisms. Technical subjection of choices to the logic compatability. Continuous recombination of compatible fragments. Cooperation without memory. Exhaustion of possible. Europe/Arbitrary Power The European entity has been conceived since its beginning as a possibility of overcoming passion: nationalist, ideological, cultural passion, dangerous marks of belonging. Even the European aesthetics is marked by an intentional frigidity, distancing us from the romantic imprinting of European modernity. By this point of view Europe is a perfectly postmodern construction. By studying European Union we study power in its post-political operationality.

ECSA ECONOMIC IDEAS Akseli Virtanen Translated by Janna Jalkanen Greenhill [An Excerpt from Arbitrary Power. Towards a Critique of Biopolitical Economy (Helsinki: Tutkijaliitto, 2006.] What is the relationship between governance and the economy? What form of government and organizing does oikonomia actually mean? The heroes of The Iliad and The Odyssey did not know of it. Neither do we find the term in Hesiod’s Works and Days, despite the fact that it is constructed around the existence of human need and the solution of this problem. (59) Neither Protagoras nor anybody else in 5th century BC Greece seems to be using the term either. Yet it must have been generally known in 399 BC, because this is the year Socrates died, and even though he did not hesitate to challenge his judges, he was all too lucid a Greek to have complicated his position by using new terminology when he addressed the Athenian crowd. (60)

Akseli Virtanen Translated by Janna Jalkanen Greenhill In one of his lectures Gilles Deleuze explains how we could best understand what a matter in a state of continuous mutation or variation means.(221) When we perceive a table, the physicist will have already explained that here we have atoms and electrons in movement, but it is difficult for us to perceive the table as movement-matter. How could we then best understand movement as matter? Deleuze answers, “by thinking of it as metal”. It might be wise to explain this a little. In the lecture Deleuze invites Edmund Husserl and Gilbert Simondon to help him. (222) According to Husserl we can distinguish unchanging, comprehensible and eternal essences as well as things that we can sense and perceive: there are formal, intelligible essences like the circle as a geometrical essence, and then round things, sensible, formed, perceivable things like for instance a wheel or a table. Between these there is however an intermediary domain consisting of elements that are not fixed or formal and neither sensible or perceptible. Husserl calls them morphological essences that have a “floating” effect on the sensory life. Unlike the formal essences these are inexact or indeterminate essences: their indeterminacy is not haphazard nor a defect, for they are indeterminate by their essence. They belong to a space and time which is in itself indeterminate. So there is an exact and definite time-space and an indeterminate and indefinite time- space, endless and spaceless time, to which Henri Bergson refers when he says that “time is exactly this indeterminateness” (223). Formless or indeterminate (Husserl uses the term vage) essences belong to the latter, for they cannot be reduced to their visible and spatial conditions. As Deleuze says, Husserl knew very well that “vage” is vagus: these are the heart of the vagrant, the rambling, stateless, formless, precarious, vagabond essences. Husserl defines these vagabond essences as certain kinds of materialities or corporealities. They are something different than thingness, which is a quality of sensible, perceivable, formed things (a plate), or than essentiality which is a quality of formal, definite and fixed essences (a circle). According to Deleuze, Husserl defines corporeality in two ways. First, it cannot be distinguished from the events of transformation whose place it is: its first character is fusion, dissolution, propagation, event, passage to the limit which means mutation etc. The indeterminate time-space is thus the place of mutation.

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. RELATED PUBLICATIONS Mikko Jakonen, Jukka Peltokoski, Akseli Virtanen (eds.) Uuden työn sanakirja [The Dictionary of New Work - A Map to Precarious Life]. Helsinki: Tutkijaliitto 2006, Polemos-series, 500 p. General Intellect: Vasemmisto etsii työtä. Helsinki: Like Publishing 2008.

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

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. RELATED PUBLICATIONS Félix Guattari: Kolme ekologiaa [Three Ecologies]. Helsinki: Tutkijaliitto 2008. Félix Guattari: Kaaosmoosi [Chaosmosis]. Helsinki: Tutkijaliitto 2010. Bracha Ettinger: Yhdessätuotanto [Co-poiesis. Edited by Akseli Virtanen]. Helsinki: Tutkijaliitto 2009.

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. RELATED PUBLICATIONS Risto Heiskala & Akseli Virtanen (eds.): Talous ja yhteiskuntateoria [Economy and Social Theory]. Helsinki: Gaudeamus 2011- 2018. 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…)

”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: 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)