## SENSIBILITY AND SEMIO-CAPITALISM - A BODILY EXPERIENCE OF CRISIS IN URSULA ANDKJÆR OLSEN'S THE CRISIS NOTEBOOKS

## Emma Sofie Brogaard Jespersen

## ABSTRACT

In The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance (2012), Franco 'Bifo' Berardi unfolds a political and clinical diagnosis of contemporary society, stating that the crisis we experience today is a permanent state of absent social autonomy and political agency. This crisis is not solely economic but is caused by semio-capitalism impacting all spheres of human life, affecting sensibility in particular -the linguistic and physical-sensuous link between the individual and the world.

Taking up the term sensibility as a bodily basis of experience and as an aesthetic notion, in this article I will explore the relation between individual and collective bodies, the crisis as a suspension of  change,  and  literature,  focusing  on  the  Danish  poet  Ursula Andkjær Olsen's 2017 lunatic and fragmented novel of love and economy The Crisis Notebooks ,  but also with reference to some of  her  other  work(s).  I  argue  that  the  bodily  experience  of  crisis, as expressed in this novel, leads to an inhibited social sensibility but also, paradoxically, to a radical openness towards the world. With  reference  to  the  Danish  literary  scholar  Anne  Fastrup's interpretation  of  French  vitalism's  idea  of  sensibility  in The Movement of Sensibility (2007), I suggest that a more ambiguous, material notion of both a constructive and a destructive sensibility is crucial for its understanding, and hence -for an understanding of the relationship between body and crisis as expressed in The Crisis Notebooks .

Finally,  I  suggest  that  an  aesthetic  notion  of  sensibility  can provide a prism through which relations between today's financial mechanisms and a sociocultural experience of crisis are rendered visible -if not sensuous -and it is from here that alternatives to the crisis can be found, felt, formulated or fabulated.

## KEYWORDS

Finance, Sensibility, Semio-capitalism, Crisis, Body, Ursula Andkjær Olsen I've become one who wishes to postpone the critical moment, hold my breath, hold back, drag everything out, one who fears the crisis, the one who fears it the most (…) In addition: The displacement of the critical moment into an inner phenomenon, that moment, there where it happens, there where this happens as a radical transformation of the brain/heart. 1

## INTRODUCTION

In  her  2017  lunatic,  ruptured  and  rambling  novel  of  love  and economy, with  its  significant  three-part  title: The Crisis Notebooks. Pandora Blue Box. The Atlantis Syndrome, 2 the acclaimed and extraordinary Danish poet and author Ursula Andkjær Olsen presents a fragmented and frustrating contemporary condition of interconnected physical, personal and global crises. Departing from  the  ancient  Greek  myth  of  Pandora's  box,  the  novel establishes  an  underlying  narrative  structure  of  mythological crisis, which is reflected, rewritten and challenged as the novel unfolds.  As  the  above  quotation  suggests,  however,  there  is something significant in this experience of crisis in the novel: an absence of a critical turning point, a dragging out, unrestrained fabulation and a bated breath, which seem to articulate the crisis as a temporally extended condition affecting the material body.

This  bodily  experience  of  crisis  as  a  chronic  condition,  I contend, is not only a focal point in Andkjær's novel, but it also indicates  a  (shifting,  elusive,  sometimes  hidden)  relationship between the finance economy and its material underpinnings. A symptomatic experience and a relation, which appears as an expression of more general conditions of aesthetic production and  literary  representation  in  the  contemporary  moment  of finance capitalism. This problematic relation is also to be found in  Swedish  author  Andrzej  Tichý's  2013  novel Kairos and  in Olsen's previous works such as the poetry collections 2012 ThirdMillennium Heart, translated into English in 2017 and the 2015 Outgoing vessel, 3 both of which orbit around an economic body, its  interior  and  exterior  transactions,  motherhood,  abortion, society, economy and gender, and all their interrelations.

I  want  to  accentuate  this  intricate  intersection  of  crisis, finance  capitalism  and  the  material  and  literary  corpus,  as  it opens up fresh critical perspectives on the financialization that has happened since the 1970s. 4 In this article, I thus want to offer an initial exploration of this intersection -of the crisis as one result of the operations of finance capitalism, the psychosomatic body, and its literary representations -through the concept of sensibility, as both a bodily basis of experience and an aesthetic notion. This approach, wherein I argue that the interconnections between  aesthetics  and  finance,  literature  and  crisis,  and language and capital can be revealed and explored through the concept of sensibility, renders possible a critical examination of the operations of finance capital in areas which are not explicitly situated within the vast sphere of the finance economy. That is to say, a focus on sensibility is also a way to insist on materiality which is not only neglected at this neoliberal historical moment, but  also  often  seems -intentionally  or  unintentionally -to  be somewhat overlooked in the  field  of  Critical  Finance  Studies (which of course is subjected to those same conditions it criticizes). Thus, it is my hope that this tentative reorientation of focus, as a concurrent trajectory within the field, towards sensibility might also embody other and -what I in lack of the right words will call -more modest forms of agency, ideas of resistance, or simply, vulnerable and insurgent alternatives to the state of things.

In keeping with Frederic Jameson's statement that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, 5 the Italian post-Marxist thinker Franco 'Bifo' Berardi presents a political and clinical  diagnosis  of  contemporary  Western  society  in  his  2012 publication The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance . He argues that the crisis experienced today is not solely a result of the 2007-2008 economic breakdown, but must also be conceived as a crisis in the social imagination about the future. 6 Where crisis historically referred to a problematic situation of change or a turning point, the crisis of the contemporary conjuncture, Berardi contends, is characterized instead by an absence of social autonomy and political agency. Viewing the European uprisings of 2011 as desperate and aggressive reactions to the precarious circumstances caused by the financial collapse, he notes how neither a global protest movement nor the failure of the economic system have led to any fundamental changes of the course of things. 7 This apparent suspension of change leads Berardi to reconsider the nature of the idea of crisis. He argues that all crises at this point in history , be they economic, ecological, geopolitical  or  humanitarian,  are  neither  to  be  considered  as delimited nor as decisive turning points. Rather, they constitute one permanent condition of crisis, a postponement of the critical turning points, which he comprehends as a sociocultural crisis in the social and political imagination; a dysfunction in the individual and collective ability to create solidary relations and communities as the basis for imagining and, thus, shaping the future. 8

This sociocultural crisis, Berardi argues, is not only economic but it is caused by the present economic mechanisms of the finance economy . He  argues  that  these  economic  circumstances  have altered  the  social  reality  since  they  have  alienated  the  human being  from  its  perceptive,  sensuous  and  social  body,  and  in particular, they have affected the sensibility : a term Berardi uses to describe the linguistic and physical-sensuous link between the individual and the world. 9 Despite the universalizing manoeuvres of Berardi's analysis in articulating an us and the human being as such, the term sensibility is particularly interesting as it offers a double perspective: not only it establishes a relationship between specific historic economic circumstances and their psycho-somatic consequences, but it is also a primary aesthetic feature. To him, aesthetics is characterized by the investigation and representation of  the  impressionability of sensitive surfaces: ' Actually,' writes Berardi, 'aesthetics is the science dedicated to the study of contact between the derma (the skin, the sensitive surface of our bodymind)  and  different  chemical,  physical,  electromagnetic,  and informal-flows.' 10 Therefore, I claim that the sensibility , the bodily experience of crisis, represented in The Crisis Notebooks, allows me to conceive of the novel itself as a sensitive surface of contact, one which reflects and responds to a contemporary experience of crisis. It is this contention that I shall seek to expand upon in this article.

According to Berardi, the primary reason for the contemporary condition  of  crisis  is  the  change  over  the  last  50  years  from industrial capitalism to finance- and semio-capitalism. One of the most crucial events in this regard was Nixon's 1971 abolition of the gold standard and the Bretton Woods agreement, 11 which Berardi describes as actions of dereferencialization, since the value  of  the  dollar  lost  its  connection  to  a  physical  reality. 12 This may appear as an excessive conclusion, but it nevertheless aligns with other theoreticians in and outside the field, including Marazzi, 13 MacKenzie 14 and  Appadurai. 15 ,  as  it  stresses  the performative  and  immaterial  character  of  finance  capitalism. Berardi  refers  to  this  self-referential  economic  paradigm  as semio-capitalism , since the primary production is not based on physical things but rather the exchange of semia -signs: 'There are no longer material things, but signs; no longer the production of things which are tangible visible materials, but the production of something that is essentially semiotic.' 16

Following this argumentation, in the present age of digital semio-capitalism the spheres of production and language would seem  to  coincide,  resulting  in  the  abstraction  of  work  which is  increasingly  based  on  cognitive  labour  and  the  immaterial exchange of information. These accelerating processes alienate -whom he designates as -'the cognitive workers' from their social, perceptive and affective bodies. Furthermore, in his 2015 book AND.  Phenomenology  of  the  End  -  Sensibility  and  Connective Mutation Berardi  states  that  'the  infosphere  acts  directly  on the nervous system of society, affecting the psychosphere and affecting  sensibility  in  particular,' 17 emphasizing  how  the accelerating  infosphere,  the  dimension  of  intentional  signs surrounding  the  sensitive  organism,  affects  sensibility. 18 As stated  above,  Berardi  conceptualizes  this  sensibility  as  the surface of contact between the human being and the world; a sensuous,  affective  and  linguistic  attentiveness,  receptiveness and capacity for interpretation and comprehension crucial for the social organism to interact with itself and the surrounding world. 19 However,  this  sensibility  is  inhibited  by  the  semiocapitalist rationalization of language, which becomes operational, standardized and thus exchangeable, so to minimize friction in the  still  accelerating  exchange  of  information  and  immaterial value. 20 For him, this paradigm of semio-capitalism pervades all spheres of human life, and thus inhibits the ability to understand, express, imagine and create different relations and conjunctions -or alternative futures, if you like.

My  interest  here  is  how  the  contemporary  condition  of permanent crisis, as outlined by Berardi, can be understood as a crisis in sensibility. Although Berardi, in his eclectic way, engages with  a  broad  spectrum  of  the  affective,  cognitive,  linguistic, semiotic, techno-digital aspects of sensibility in his diagnosis of  contemporary  society,  to  which  this  introduction  doesn't do justice, he tends to neglect the concrete material and bodily aspects of crisis, which can be said to be both a premise for and bear the consequences of finance/semio-capitalism. Furthermore, he would seem to ignore specific historic-geographic experiences in  his  universalising  sketches.  Nevertheless,  I  find  the  notion of sensibility useful because it infers the exact opposite of his statement 'there are no longer material things (…),' and clears the way for a bodily experience of crisis, a materiality also affected by the workings of finance/semio-capitalism. With its double gesture,  the  notion  of  sensibility  offers  both  a  way  to  render other  aspects  of  the  contemporary  financialized  conjuncture perceptible  and  an  analytical  method  to  approach  works  like Olsen's The  Crisis  Notebooks, which  is  both  a  representation and a consequence of the crisis. It is thus not my intention to diminish the affective, cognitive, linguistic or semiotic aspects of Berardi's analysis, but to stress the that crisis also has a bodily and material dimension, which an analysis of a work like The Crisis Notebooks can help unfold and challenge, precisely because it articulates both specific and collective bodily experiences in an all-embracing condition of crisis.

## THE SOCIAL SENSIBILITY: EVERYTHING AND NOTHING IS CONNECTED

The Crisis Notebooks' barely coherent plot concerns a romantic break-up  and  its  emotional  aftershock:  A  semi-mythological woman, Pandora, who is employed in Copenhagen's contemporary private sector, has been left by a man named Romeo just prior to the beginning of the novel. However, the plot can be described more  accurately  as  a  porous  web  of  thoughts,  feelings  and untamed  associations,  which  unfolds  through  first  person reminiscences,  vertical  homespun  philosophical  statements, poems and numbered lists. The text is a collection of dreams, mythology, past, present and possible actions, which constantly interpret and reinterpret the narrative fragments. This disrupted form could appear unsettling  to  a  literary  analysis;  for  every conclusion one arrives at, the exact opposite would be just as valid. However, it simultaneously creates a strange social ontology: the plot is temporally and spatially disjointed, and instead of being set within a logical time and space or causality, it unfolds in a myriad of connections and relations, constantly finding new ways to interconnect. The effect is one of an all-embracing condition of crisis in which Pandora's emotional state is further linked to local and global crises: 'Given that the world is not one , but a farrago of beings (organisms), there is not one crisis, one critical moment, but a string, an eternal string.' 21

The Crisis Notebooks as an eternal string of crises in every sphere, nevertheless, seems to refer to a passage which frames an inherent relationship  between  crisis  and  physical  experience.  In  the fourth notebook, the relationship between Pandora and Romeo is laid out as a pastiche of the myth of Pandora's box, in which an intriguing parallel between body and box is drawn: 'Pandora opened the body, she shouldn't have done that, it's not true. It was not a coincidence (that she did it).' 22

However, unlike the original myth, wherein misfortune and crisis are let out into the world when the box is opened, the reverse is  true in Olsen's text in which crisis seems to enter Pandora's body. Pandora describes how she used to live in a wordless realm of deep forests and high mountains, until she met Romeo from 'the land of bridges and passages, where everything is exchange, exchangeable.' 23 Romeo enters the picture with his 'methods, technics and blonde locks,' 24 as another Prometheus, and seduces her with words that subvert her harmonically closed circuit and breaks  everything  to  pieces. 25 As  the  romantic  relationship unfolds, Romeo increasingly seems to be an economic rationality entering Pandora's organic body; as a semio-capitalist system of words, transactions, and infrastructure being inscribed into the material body; as an inner architecture of bridges and passages, making  everything  exchangeable: 26 And  in  there,  the  breakup, the relational collapse, the economic crash happens, in an immense  entanglement  of  emotional  and  economic  states  of crisis. 'How did it get in here,' Pandora asks at one point, 'I don't know.' 27

It  might  be  limiting  to  read  Romeo  as  an  allegory  of  finance capitalism -but the pastiche frames a general turn in the mythical direction of the motion of crisis in the novel, wherein the crisis of the financial economy takes place within Pandora's body, leaving her with an alienated sense of embodiment. One of numerous examples is this contradictory quote:

Mankind, we are the habitat for capital, it paralyzes us to be a habitat for something else, we lie down and let the capitalism move upon us, in us, via us, we lie completely still. Or the immovability  of  the  market  society,  it  can't  be  changed, apparently it can't be changed, instead the humans, we, who live in it, we have to change with steadily increasingly haste, improve ourselves, educate ourselves, become faster, stronger, better, with steadily increasingly haste. 28

Throughout the novel Pandora tries to explain her bodily condition with  all  sorts  of  clinical  diagnoses  from  depression,  anxiety, and  stress  to  midlife  crisis  and  social  phobia.  This  myriad  of pathological conditions refers to widely differing altered bodily experiences, but all imply a distance from social reality. In a novel where everything seems to be internally connected to everything else this appears as a conspicuous social dysfunction. This distance is expressed through descriptions of Pandora's anatomy as hollow, empty, as a border between the outer world and her inner abyss.

(…) When i'm in the company of other people, i really make an effort to be right underneath the skin, i settle myself there right under the skin, so that i can see through the eyes, hear, everything which, i do everything i can to stay there, a place we share, the surfaces, what am i to do (…) 29

It is intriguing to see how the body's sensitive surface -the skin, the eyes, the ears -becomes the condition for a common social reality,  and  how  the  material  body  affected  by  the  workings of  capital  prevents  Pandora  from  connecting  to  her  sensitive surfaces,  so  causing  an  inhibited  social  sensibility.  It  seems like the sensibility portrayed here is not only one way of social interaction but a fundamental premise for a shared reality. The sensibility presented in the novel thus shares similarities with Berardi's argument regarding how an inhibited social sensibility can be viewed as the result of the workings of financial rationalism. However,  the  obstinate  ambiguity  of  the  novel  also  seems  to suggest the exact opposite: That there is something problematic about being interconnected to the world. That a sensitive openness towards the world makes the body exposed and vulnerable to outside impressions:

'This shitty situation, now I am uneasy, am fucked, I see this riddled wing of an insect, leaf, something, it is organic, riddled, very unsettled image/feeling, the feeling is: Everything can intrude, can run out,' 30

Pandora blurts out at one point, indicating an aspect of sensibility which Berardi's notion of sensibility does not seem to imply, that is: being connected to the world can be a 'shitty situation.' Thus, it is clear that the all-embracing, intertwined condition of crisis in The Crisis Notebooks is experienced through the body, distorting the sensitive possibility for creating a shared reality. But at the same time, one might speculate, whether or not sensibility, as the basis of experience, is not part of the crisis itself?

## AN AMBIVALENT SENSIBILITY: BEING LEFT TO THE NERVES

Because of this paradox I turn to the work of the Danish literary scholar Anne Fastrup, and particularly to her reflections on the French vitalism of the eighteenth century and its physiological idea  of  sensibility  in The  Movement  of  Sensibility (2007). 31 Fastrup's concept of sensibility, derived from her readings of the French philosopher, writer, and editor Denis Diderot, is based on a more biological understanding of a perceptive, somatic body as a sentient, nerve-like membrane between the individual and the world. 32 Despite the anachronism of the following paragraph, I contend that this vitalist-physiological aspect of sensibility is relevant to my analysis because it suggests an ambivalence within sensibility  itself,  emphasizing  a  more  dysfunctional  aspect  of sensibility, which Berardi's notion does not capture. I maintain that  including  Fastrup's  notion  of  dysfunctional  sensibility will contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the bodily experience of crisis as expressed in The Crisis Notebooks.

Instead  of  conceiving  sensibility  only  as  the  literary  trend  of eighteenth century sentimental emotionalism, Fastrup highlights it  as  a  focal  point  in  the  development  of  medical  science  and especially in the vitalist physiology, a part of a bodily-material turn in the 1700s, a movement which, along with empiricism and materialism, dismissed the Cartesian dualistic distinction between res cogitans and res extensa , by envisioning the physical, sensing body as the fundamental basis for understanding of the human being. 33 Thus, Fastrup points out, sensibility was in this tradition both a somatic, biological and psychological phenomenon, which must be more broadly understood as a 'sensory faculty, sense of touch,  sensitivity  and  vitality  in  psychological  and  biological sense.' 34

In focusing on Diderot's homme sensible, as his conception of the general intellectual movements of the eighteenth century , Fastrup  stresses  sensibility  as  the  body's  vital  force:  the impressionability of the nerves, fibres and organs, which in a complex network of actions and reactions connects the human with the surrounding world, the physical with the physiological and the single limbs with the body as a whole. 35 This sensibility, she argues, is a cohesive principle, implying an optimistic notion of the constructive forces in the human body which allows the human  being  to  be  a  co-creator  of  the  social,  linguistic  and political context that surrounds it. 36

Fastrup's  interpretation  of  Diderot's  and  French  vitalism's idea of sensibility, might appear as a precursor of Berardi's term, but where Berardi's sensibility appears solely to imply a positive potential for conjunction and change -which can be inhibited by  exterior  conditions -Fastrup's  notion  maintains  a  duality within itself. On the one hand, it designates a constructive force, a  vital  cohesion,  but  on  the  other,  it  also  contains  the  risk  of destructive alienation. By broadening the notion to include this more dysfunctional aspect of sensibility, ways of understanding the bodily experience of crisis become more varied, as it also suggests  that  sensibility  can  be  problematic  in  itself:  exactly because it implies a physiology which predisposes the body to outside  impressions.  Sensibility  thus  also  contains  a  risk  of overstimulation; a dysfunction of the nervous system can make the body fall apart, Fastrup contends, thereby emphasizing that with sensibility as a condition of life the human being is always threatened by a loss of identity, alienation or fragmentation. 37

This dysfunctional flipside of sensibility itself seems to be omitted  in  Berardi's  notion.  Furthermore,  this  concept  both contains and exceeds Berardi's primarily immaterial idea of a social sensibility and anchors it in the materiality of the somatic body. As such, it encapsulates more accurately the paradoxical modes of sensibility that appear in The Crisis Notebooks , whereby Pandora  in  becoming  a  habitat  for  capital,  feels  both  hollow and  distanced  from  her  social  surroundings  and  at  the  same time senses the uncontrollable openness of her sensitive body. Moreover, a dysfunctional sensibility offers a theoretical space for understanding the so-called 'shitty situations' where Pandora is left to her own nerves, resulting from the circumstances of the dysfunctional sensibility of the material body itself.

## CRISIS MANAGEMENT OR ESCAPING SENSIBILITY

As a  reaction  to  this  problematic  sensibility,  both  Pandora  in Pandora Blue Box and the first-person narrator of The Atlantis Syndrome, make innumerable attempts to get rid of their sensitive bodies:

'(…) we should abolish the parasympathetic nervous system, and everything associated with it, as digestion, rest, sleep, things like that, and put focus on the sympathetic nervous system  (…)  and  its  far  more  production-  and  performance oriented areas of action,' 38

Pandora states at one point. Thereafter, she tries to solve this problematic  by  consciously  inhibiting  her  own  sensibility  by pursuing  the  idea  of  an  impervious  body  or  a  'hard  surface'. Using all imaginable processes of encapsulation, entrenchment, armoring,  chromium  plating  and  surface  treatments  with chemical solvent, Rexona, or plastic, 39 Pandora seems to try to adjust to the condition of crisis by creating an indifferent sense of  embodiment. This inhibition of sensibility culminates in a passage in The Atlantis Syndrome where the anonymous narrator, realizing its incapability to change the outer world from the inside, resolves to change its own interiority itself instead by training to become a new human, over-human, non-human; an anaerobebeing in the shape of a germ, a bacteria, a hybrid or a crystal. 40 At this point in the novel a whole new humanity, or that is, inhumanity, is called for by the narrator. The expectation of a fully anaerobic, crystallized, non-being, seems to be a performance of complete adaption to the condition of crisis -which goes further than  the  previous  expressions  of  a  positive  social  sensibility inhibited by the outer world, or a dysfunctional sensibility, which in  itself  is  problematic  and  thus  needs  to  be  inhibited;  but  a cynical, crystalline existence, which has dismissed all sensible relations to the outer world, and is thus unable to experience the condition of crisis, as it has given up the basis of experience itself. If the crisis is thus to be conceived of as a suspension of change, as a condition of paralysis, the insensitive existence presented in The Atlantis Syndrome appears to extend this crisis. By accepting the inability to change the world, the loss of social and political agency, the narrator gives up on the idea of any intervention in the crisis. By dismissing any forms of sensibility, the insensible nonbeing's apparent lack of need to change anything thus becomes part of the political problem itself, as it contributes yet further to the condition of crisis.

The Crisis Notebooks, therefore, appears to outline three kinds of sensibility, which I've touched upon in this article: The inhibited, the dysfunctional, and the non-existent. They constitute three relations  between  the  body  and  crisis;  a  bodily  experience  of crisis; a body which in itself is the cause of the experience of crisis, and a denial of body that, because it no longer experiences as such , only enforces the permanent state of crisis.

As a literary expression of a historic, contemporary experience of crisis, the analysed content of The Crisis Notebooks falls short of putting forward a relationship between the body and the crisis that  renders  any  distinctive,  optimistic  potential  for  change possible. But what then? How to think sensibility, materiality and collectivity under these economic circumstances? How to maintain life and a social connection to other people and to the world, if neither a receptive openness nor an armoured closedness are valid solutions?

## THE AESTHETIC SENSIBILITY?

As mentioned in the introduction, the notion of sensibility becomes relevant exactly because it can be used as a prism through which the relations between the financial mechanisms of today and a sociocultural experience of crisis can be rendered visible -if not sensuous. The focus on materiality, the materiality of the body and the represented experience of the materiality of the body, becomes a way to frame, comprehend and perhaps, feel more concretely the intersections of a socio-historic cultural experience and an abstract economic system of financial mechanisms and structures. The analytical sensitivity to sensibility thus creates the foundation for a critical examination of the interconnections and interactions of crisis, capital and body, as well as enabling other ways of approaching both literature and critical finance studies, since this approach can include other bodies or other materialities than those which are usually represented in these fields of research. And thus, as also mentioned, it is my hope that this tentative conceptual and analytical movement towards sensibility  might  be  a  transition  which  renders  other  kinds  of agency, resistance, uprisings or much less ostentatious alternative forms  possible.  However,  taking  my  analysis  of The  Crisis Notebooks as an example, the represented sensibility does not at all seem to offer any kinds of alternatives.

This is where sensibility becomes interesting as an aesthetic notion. Even though Berardi's diagnosis of contemporary society in The Uprising seems quite pessimistic, the book's subtitle, On Poetry and Finance, implies his hope for the critical potential of  poetry.  Here,  he  stresses  the  inherent  possibilities  and potentialities in aesthetics as one solution to the political-clinical condition of crisis. He argues that poetic language is marked by its in-exchangeability and, as a consequence, by the inability to be included in the mechanisms of semio-capitalism: 'Poetry', he writes, 'is the here and now of the voice, of the body and of the  word,  sensuously  giving  birth  to  meaning.' 41 This  poetic, sensuous excess is said to break up the automatization of words and bodies and give rise to new meaning. Berardi thus stresses his belief that poetry can subversively reactivate a sensibility in the physical and social bodies -and, ultimately, show a way out of crisis.

Yet, as the Danish literary scholar Elisabeth Friis alludes in the article 'Det er gyldne tider - når poesien svarer finanslogikken igen' ['It Is Golden Times -When Poetry Answers the Logic of Finance Back'], it seems quite abstract and unclear how poetry might actualize this potentiality. 42 Where Friis in the article tries to define the idea of a resistance within poetry by analysing poetry written in this historical conjuncture of crisis and, as she argues, wrestling with it, I allow myself to be more sceptical about this critical potentiality. I find Berardi's statement rather problematic because if aesthetics is the science of the derma, and is put into practice  through  an  investigation  of  the  skin -the  sensitive, physical or mental surfaces of individual and cultural bodies -why shouldn't the aesthetic sensibility , as the bodies mentioned in The Crisis Notebooks , also be affected by this crisis? Why shouldn't poetry  as  well  as  literature  and  aesthetics  be  affected  too?

Several times during the 468 pages of the chaotic web of thoughts and emotions The Crisis Notebooks appears itself to be in crisis. Especially its enervating, insisting ambiguity seems to cause an inextricable critical condition, which is emblematically expressed in a passage where Pandora falls asleep watching a documentary about LSD:

The feeling of unification, the mysterious experience, which these drugs give, the striking thing is , one of them says that this experience is attained by the disappearance of the body (or the persons in question leave the body), it is in one way grist to my mill that the body is not the way, that the body is not the way to communion (is it even about the community?), the body might come when the way is cleared, on the other hand i don't get it, the spirit is lonely, the body is connected, not to say dependent, so in that way it's the body that's right, i don't understand  how  one  can  suddenly  see  everything  through prisms. 43

In this deeply conflicted stream of consciousness, wherein the body is both the premise for and the impediment to unification/ communion/community, an unsettling ambiguity appears. With this 'gaze of prisms' where everything can be perceived from (at least) two perspectives, the text does not exactly appear as marked by a special sensuous excess that can reactivate the sensitive and through  new  meaning  cause  movement  away  from  the  crisis. Rather it would seem that the text leans over backwards and locks itself into self-contradictions.

This  inextricable  ambiguity  is  characteristic  of  Olsen's other works and particularly the 2012 poetry collection ThirdMillennium  Heart, which  in  many  ways  can  be  said  to  be  a precursor to The Crisis Notebooks. In the 2014 article 'Kroppen er  noget  andet:  Posthumanisme  og  cyborghjerter  hos  Ursula Andkjær Olsen' ['The Body Is Something Else. Posthumanism and  Cyborg  Hearts  in  the  Work  of  Ursula  Andkjær  Olsen'] the  Danish  literary  scholar  Ida  Bencke  expresses  how ThirdMilennium Heart 'is distinguished by such an extensive ambiguity, that 'the everything' of the work seems at the edge of imploding into a bewildered nothingness' 44 and that the work 'indicates a movement, with which the body as well as the universe slowly but surely expands/breaks down itself.' 45

As in Third-Millennium Heart, which culminates in such an implosion where 'ALL AND NO VESSELS ARE CONNECTED,' 46 The Crisis Notebooks seems to subvert itself  and  its  directions, exactly  by  pointing  in  every  direction.  This  kind  of  chaotic literature  seems  to  leave  its  readers  in  a  state  of  an  immense complexity  of  slippery  connections  and  meanings,  which constantly relate/unrelate in new ways. That is to say, rather than projecting bodily or textual sensibility generating new sensuous meaning, as Berardi argues, the text itself appears to undergo a crisis. Through the prisms of contradiction, The Crisis Notebooks appears to implode in negations and contrasts, levelling out every meaning. Rather than offering subversive solutions, rather than showing a way out of the crisis, The Crisis Notebooks seems to be fully affected by a directionless condition of crisis.

## THE SENSITIVE TEXT: A MODEST POTENTIALITY OF BODY-LANGUAGE

It is exactly in the middle of the all-embracing condition of crisis, that the ambivalence in the notion of sensibility becomes crucial: if  sensibility  is  conceptualized  solely  as  a  positive  potentiality, the  (crisis-)inhibited  aesthetic  sensibility  wouldn't  be  a  useful or  reliable  way  to  represent,  reflect  or  understand  a  particular historical  situation.  But  within  the  dysfunctional  aspect  of sensibility, The Crisis Notebooks could, on a formal level, appear overstimulated, hypersensitive; its fragmented, self-contradictory textuality as being directly affected by a contemporary condition of crisis. Turning away from the inhibited, the dysfunctional and the non-existent sensibility on the level of the content, I'll end this article  by  introducing  the  rhetorical  figure  of  the aposiopesis 47 , which  accentuates  the  material  aspect  of  the  text  on  a  formal level. The aposiopesis designates a relation between the body, the voice and the text, and is usually referred to as a 'stylistic term of breaking in the middle speech, which has nothing to do with implicit understanding, but happens when the living vibrations and resonances of the flesh affect the linguistic ability of the speaker.' 48

Through the lens of this notion, it becomes possible to analyze the different positions of narration -Pandora in Pandora Blue Box, and the anonymous first-person narrator of The Atlantis Syndrome -as  voices  influenced  by  a  body,  which  again  is influenced  by  the  interior  condition  of  crisis  in The  Crisis Notebooks. Furthermore,  it  allows The Crisis Notebooks to  be considered an aesthetic utterance in itself, whose sensible voice is  affected  by  a  contemporary  condition  of  crisis.  Recalling Berardi's argument that aesthetics is the science of the derma and the sensitive surfaces, the textual materiality of aesthetic work seems to respond to the crisis precisely by stuttering, stammering, fantasizing, confused and filled with interruptions, corrections and doubt. However, where the content of The Crisis Notebooks is  marked by the absence of any recognizable representations of  bodily  sensibility,  which  is  rather  expressed  as  borders, surfaces, plastic or crystal, the formal structure of the novel -the  fragmentated,  indeterminate,  porous  surface  of  the  text -seems contrarily to express a sensitive sense of embodiment: a flickering voice or a hesitant body-language, which, despite it being affected by crisis, has not lost its sensible contact with the surrounding world. This is exactly my point, and where I wish to conclude this article: that the formal structure of the novel -unlike the  characters -stays  with  the  experience  of  a  dysfunctional sensibility, expresses itself through it and thus, like a sensuous surface,  reacts  and  responds  to  its  surroundings.  Rather  than entrenching itself in impervious materials, the formal structure of the novel itself appears as if touched by crisis. Through its aposiopetic flickering of this touch The Crisis Notebooks makes manifest a bodily vulnerability, insecurity and doubt.

Thus, the text itself resembles a body; a textual, sensuous, material body which seems to be a container -or a box, if you like -for  the  contemporary  experience  of  crisis.  In  the  small 1986  essay The  Carrier  Bag  Theory  of  Fiction American sci-fi author, essayist and poet Ursula K. Le Guin calls for a poetics that  turns  away  from  the  dominant,  linear,  masculine,  heroic ways of narrating history, which with the shape of an arrow or a sword 'is starting here and going straight there. THOK. Hitting its mark (which drops dead).' 49 Instead, she suggests a new way of narrating history, telling stories, creating myths, which, as an alternative to focusing on the thing, draws attention to the things that hold other things , arguing that the most fitting shape for a novel she can think of might be that of a sack or a bag, as books hold words and words hold things or carry meanings: 50

Conflict,  competition,  stress,  struggle,  etc.,  within  the narrative conceived as carrier bag/belly/box/house/medicine bundle, may be seen as necessary elements of a whole which itself cannot be characterized either as conflict or as harmony since its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process. 51

This  poetics,  according  to  which  the  purpose  of  narration is  neither  resolution  nor  stasis  but  a  continuing,  speculative process  'full  of  beginnings  without  ends,  of  initiations,  of losses, of transformations and translations and far more tricks than  conflicts,  far  fewer  triumphs  than  snares  and  delusions (…),' 52 sheds  new  light  on  the  alternatives  or  potentialities presented in The Crisis Notebooks. With the explicit reference to the myth of Pandora in the subtitle Pandora Blue Box, and with the recurrent play on a textual/physical body as a container of experience of crisis -these ideas are clearly present in the novel . In that sense, The Crisis Notebooks could resemble a black box (a small electronic device, placed in an aircraft for the purpose of recording everything which happens before a plane crash), a sensitive recording of an emotional, personal but also collective, contemporary historical crash.

It is in this sensitive surface of contact between the crisis and the novel that a kind of aesthetic sensibility appears. However, it  is  more modest than the one Berardi called for. Rather than unfolding  an  excess  of  sensibility,  an  abundance  of  bodily potentiality  for  interconnectedness,  which  brings  about  new meaning and new imaginaries, which, somewhat heroically, can show a way out of the crisis, The Crisis Notebooks expresses a kind of fabulating body-language, which in a trembling voice quavers around in the extended condition of crisis. The aesthetic potentiality of The Crisis Notebooks emerges exactly, not in spite of, but because the novel is undergoing a crisis; it is by virtue of its quavering sense of embodiment, its vulnerable voice, its dragging out and its bated breath, that it expresses a sensuous experience of crisis . Or, to quote Donna Haraway, The Crisis Notebooks appears to be staying with sensibility while 'staying with the trouble.' 53 Thus, alternatives are not to be found outside of the crisis, or in a movement out of the crisis, but instead it is from this sensitive, fabulating, vulnerable, insurgent ground, or container, that other narratives, other embodiments, other myths and other poetics are made possible.

## CONCLUSION

Through the notion of sensibility, as a bodily basis of experience and as an aesthetic notion, in this article I have examined the relationship of crisis, body and literature, in the context of the contemporary economic and financial predicament.

Following  Berardi's  political  and  clinical  diagnosis  of contemporary  Western  society  as  experiencing  a  permanent crisis condition of suspended change, derived from finance- and semio-capitalism's inhibiting economizing pervasion of human sensibility -I have suggested this crisis is a crisis in sensibility itself.  Contrary  to  Berardi  and  as  a  reorientation  of  the  main focus  of  critical  finance  studies,  I  argue  that  such  framing  of perspective renders a bodily experience of crisis, or the financeaffected materiality, perceptible. Thus, with the double meaning of the notion of sensibility, I have approached the relation between the  contemporary  financialized  conjuncture  and  a  specific sensitive bodily experience of crisis, through Olsen's novel The Crisis Notebooks , which led to a paradoxical representation of the economized social sensibility as both inhibited and overstimulated.

With reference to Fastrup's interpretation of French vitalism's more ambiguous and biological, material idea of sensibility, that is both constructive and destructive, I argue that a more complex understanding of sensibility would be fruitful for the analysis, stressing sensibility at the basis of experience as problematic or critical  in  itself.  The  inclusion  of  an  experience  of  a  materialdysfunctional  aspect  of  sensibility  in  my  analysis  led  me  to conclude  that  three  kinds  of  sensibility -the  inhibited,  the dysfunctional  and  the  non-existent -constitute  three  relations between the body and the crisis: a bodily experience of crisis; a body which in itself is the cause of the experience of crisis; and a denial of the body that, as it is no longer experiences, enforces further the permanent state of crisis.

By focusing on Berardi's idea that aesthetics holds a potential for reactivating the constructive sensibility, I have discussed whether The Crisis Notebooks as a literary work offers potential solutions or resistant alternatives or if the novel, in itself, is undergoing a crisis. From this I concluded that The Crisis Notebooks, at a formal level, carries  and  communicates  a  kind  of  body-language,  a  textual, overstimulated, quivering sensibility that, more than implying a heroic movement out of the crisis, hints towards a possible bodily sensibility within the crisis, which, I contend, is the vulnerable but insurgent ground from which new narratives, embodiments, and myths are to be found, felt, formulated or fabulated.

- 1 Ursula Andkjær Olsen, Krisehæfterne: Pandora Blue Box. Atlantissyndromet (København: Gyldendal, 2017), 454 .
- 2 My translation of Krisehæfterne. Pandora Blue Box. Atlantissyndromet . All quotes from this novel are translated by me.
- 3 My translation of Ursula Andkjær Olsen, Udgående Fartøj (København: Gyldendal, 2015).
- 4 As argued among others by Robert Brenner, 'What Is Good for Goldman Sachs Is Good for America: The Origins of the Current Crisis,' April 2009, http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/issr/cstch/papers/ BrennerCrisisTodayOctober2009.pdf, and Greta Krippner, 'Introduction,' and 'What is financialization?,' in Capitalizing on Crisis - the political origins of the rise of finance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012).
- 5 Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2007), xii.
- 6 Franco 'Bifo' Berardi, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012), 8.
- 7 Ibid., 53.
- 8 Ibid., 7.
- 9 Franco 'Bifo' Berardi, After the Future , eds. Gary Genosko and Nicholas Thoburn (Edinburgh: AK Press 2011), 132.
- 10 Franco 'Bifo' Berardi, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance , 145.
- 11 Ibid., 30.
- 12 Ibid., 86.
- 13 Christian Marazzi, The Violence of Financial Capitalism (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011).
- 14 Donald MacKenzie, Material Markets - How Economic Agents are Constructed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
- 15 Arjun Appadurai, Banking on Words - The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016).
- 16 Franco 'Bifo' Berardi, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance , 86.
- 17 Franco 'Bifo' Berardi. AND - Phenomenology of the End: Sensibility and Connective Mutation (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2015), 113.
- 18 Franco 'Bifo' Berardi, After the Future , 132.
- 19 Franco 'Bifo' Berardi, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance , 120-121.
- 20 Ibid., 124-125.
- 21 Ursula Andkjær Olsen. Krisehæfterne: Pandora Blue Box. Atlantissyndromet , 412.
- 22 Ibid., 105.
- 23 Ibid., 109.
- 24 Ibid., 110.
- 25 Ibid., 109.
- 26 Ibid., 112.
- 27 Ibid., 112.
- 28 Ibid., 460.
- 29 Ibid., 113.
- 30  Ibid., 33.
- 31 My translation of Anne Fastrup, Sensibilitetens Bevægelse: Denis Diderots fysiologiske æstetik (København: Museum Tusculanums Forlag, 2007). All quotes from this book are translated by me.
- 32 Anne Fastrup, Sensibilitetens Bevægelse: Denis Diderots fysiologiske æstetik , 86.
- 33  Ibid., 65.
- 34  Ibid., 15.
- 35  Ibid., 13.
- 36 Ibid., 171.
- 37 Ibid., 18.
- 38  Ursula Andkjær Olsen, Krisehæfterne: Pandora Blue Box. Atlantissyndromet , 288.
- 39 Ibid., 329.
- 40  Ibid., 395.
- 41 Franco 'Bifo' Berardi, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance , 21.
- 42 Friis, Elisabeth, 'Det er gyldne tider - når poesien svarer finanslogikken igen.' Kritik, Krise, no. 214 (2015): 53.
- 43  Ursula Andkjær Olsen. Krisehæfterne: Pandora Blue Box. Atlantissyndromet , 364.
- 44  Ida Bencke, 'Kroppen er noget andet: Posthumanisme og cyborghjerter hos Ursula Andkjær Olsen,' Kritik, Naturen, det billige skidt , no. 211 (2015): 54.
- 45  Ibid., 55.
- 46  Ursula Andkjær Olsen Third-Millennium Heart , trans. Katrine Øgaard (Berlin: Broken Dimanche Press/Notre Dame, IN: Action Books, 2017), 210.
- 47 The literary historian Anna Kornbluh has also been working with stylistic figures and finance: Anna Kornbluh, Realizing Capital - Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014).
- 48  My translation of Martin Gregersen and Tobias Skiveren, Den materielle drejning: Natur, teknologi og krop i (nyere) dansk litteratur (Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag, 2016), 127.
- 49  Ursula K. Le Guin, 'The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,' in Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (Newburyport: Grove Atlantic, 1989), 156.
- 50  Ibid., 156.
- 51 Ibid., 156.
- 52 Ibid., 157.
- 53  Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).