False Autonomy

It was not long into my reading of Lazzarato that I began to see him outlining the similarities between immaterial labor and Fordist/Taylorian methods of productive management. The reason this is even worth noting for me is because up until the point I approached Lazzarato, and even up until, say, the second section of his piece, I was either naïve or optimistic enough to think that immaterial/mental labor might embody “true” autonomy, as opposed to corrupted, co-opted, enveloped, or managed autonomy, which I see Lazzarato talking about.

Lazzarato, I think, takes a moment to create this false sense of optimism about true autonomy in immaterial labor, writing, “In today’s large restructured company, a worker’s work increasingly involves, at various levels, an ability to choose among different alternatives and thus a degree of responsibility regarding decision making.” He is here instantiating the idea that because we can now partake in immaterial labor, the days of management, or at least “mere execution,” are over. But they aren’t!

He then goes on to say, “The worker’s personality and subjectivity have to be made susceptible to organization and command,” and later, “Today’s management thinking takes workers’ subjectivity into consideration only in order to codify it in line with the requirements of production.”

It then becomes apparent that the “self-valorization that the struggle against work has produced” has been re-enveloped by capital. Immaterial labor is not a site for resistance, or, it turns out, even autonomy within capital. While it is communication and subjectivity that get incorporated into the cycle of reproduction, there are still at work Taylorian, and more specifically, panoptical, principles that are needed for the management, codification, and extraction of the immaterial labor-value from this intellectual proletariat.

Because immaterial labor must project itself as necessarily and inherently autonomous, it "manages" management, through panotpicism, that is, self-management. Lazzarato writes that “the quality of this kind of [immaterial] labor power is thus defined not only by its professional capacities, but also by its ability to ‘manage’ its own activity . . . “ He also writes that “Capital wants a situation where command resides within the subject him- or herself, and within the communicative process. The worker is to be responsible for his or her own control and motivation within the work group . . .” Thus, there is no manager standing over the immaterial laborer, perfecting his shovel technique and capacity. Rather, and much more insidiously, the immaterial laborer manages him- or herself.

I feel like I’ve said my share for this post, but I do want to point out how we can relate “pellets” and the blurring between leisure/labor times to this notion of false autonomy and self-management. Before, for me at least, pellets, like immaterial labor in general, still contained the possibility for genuine flexibility and autonomy, but after reading Lazzarato, pellets of time now seem more like a self-management strategy that aspires to the creation of the constant laborer.