after reading Lazzarato

Back in my days working in a TV station, nobody among my colleagues said “we are producers of culture.” Rather, we all said that we were just workers in a manufacturing company. This self-disparaging statement actually does not sound refreshing due to the redundant use of it by so many people in so many different occupations. Anyway, what the statement meant was two fold in my configuration.

First, we realized that there was not much room for creativity and real individuality to work in our work process. Thinking of TV programs in general, you can’t say there is lots of creativity and independency going on in TV programs unless you watch only public access channels. As a TV producer, you are supposed to make shows in certain ways you already know, you are supposed to know, and you are taught to know. Your boss does not tell you what to do because you are a member of union and you claim that you have right to be independent. Nonetheless, you have to feel humiliation while you work in cultural industry, because what you do is just following an existing order. So you can say you are working on a conveyer belt.

Second, we were put in an environment where high competition of advertising market forced TV people to try hard to hold more eyes of audiences on TV while your program was aired. Rating, although I worked in a public company, seemed to dominate all other rationales and logics. In this setting, you are supposed to lose individuality. It is not difficult to realize that you are constantly working when you watch commercials, buy candy bars, talk with your guests, and spend free time for leisure activities. What you need to know and learn is everywhere and ubiquitous. Therefore we were constructed by the postindustrial order as a “consumer / communicator.” We “satisfy a demand by the consumer and at the same time establish that demand.”

When I read Lazzarato saying that “the post-Taylorist mode of production is defined precisely by putting subjectivity to work both in the activation of productive cooperation and in the production of the cultural contents of commodities,” I thought what he says resonates a lot with my experience. I would say I was working in the cycle of “author, reproduction, and reception.” In my understating, technoculture allows laypersons to participate in this cycle while they are mesmerized by “valorization.” Laypersons put a lot of immaterial labour, no matter whether they realize what they are doing, and get drowned in the cycle.