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

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.


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 Andkjaer 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 Andkjaer'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 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  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 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 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 alienatewhom 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, 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  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

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 Sensibility and Semio-capitalism 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. 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. 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 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,  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.