Animal Spirit – A Bestiary of the Commons

di Matteo Pasquinelli

Introduction

What constitutes the common? While I was exploring the dark sides
of digital commons and culture industry, the awakening of the animal
spirits of the financial crisis during 2008 became in fact the horizon of
the political debate. The idea of investigating the animal spirits of the
commons was actually conceived a few years earlier, when the global
mediascape following stock indexes were fed by the pornography of
war terrorism. Yet the irrational fears and forces struggling behind
media
networks were never illuminated by critical thinkers and political
activists or, more specifically, considered as a productive component
of economic flows. John Maynard Keynes once defined ‘animal spirits’
as precisely those unpredictable human drives that influence stock
markets and push economic cycles.1 Similarly, in his recent work, Paolo
Virno has underlined how all institutions (from the nation-state to contemporary
digital networks) represent an extension of the aggressive
instincts of humankind.2 In this reading, language and culture form the
basis of the common (networking), but also new fields of antagonism and
chaos (notworking).3

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Manifesto Urban Cannibalism