CONCEPT
Poetry as Insurrection
Berardi's name for the political function of language that exceeds its informational content — the use of language to produce experiences that resist reduction to the semiotic, and therefore resist capture by the production process.
Poetry, for Berardi, is not a literary genre. It is a function of language — the function by which language exceeds its informational content and produces experiences that resist reduction to data. The poem does not merely convey information about sadness; it produces the experience of sadness in the reader's body. It does not describe beauty; it instantiates beauty in the rhythm and texture of its own linguistic material. The meaning of the poem is not separable from its form. It cannot be paraphrased without loss. It cannot be summarized without destruction. It cannot be converted into data without ceasing to be what it is. Poetry is, in this sense, the antithesis of semiocapitalism's linguistic regime — the mode of language use that resists capture because its value cannot be extracted from its form.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The political argument follows from the linguistic one. If capitalism's tendency is to reduce language