Picking up on Perry's comments about cell phones -- it's hard not to detect a certain marketing imperative to capture non-commercially mediated interaction in privatized communication networks. As a recovering reality TV viewer, I think of shows like Newport Harbor ("the real OC"), in which the cell phone is perhaps an even more important cast member than the car. Some of the most important social interactions take place via cell phone, which has interesting consequences for dramatic encounters: rather than a close-up two shot, we see cross-cutting from one person talking into their cell phone to an interlocutor, also on a cell phone somewhere else, perhaps even in the same house or at the same club. Which is a roundabout way to get at the notion that the valorization of "affective" or "immaterial" labor relies upon a material infrastructure (if we're going to make this distinction). More concretely, there are "means of production" for affective labor just as their are means of production for material labor. When Rupert Murdoch paid a half-billion dollars for MySpace he was buying the means of production for the valorization of the affective labor of social networking. When we move our e-mail correspondence onto Google's servers, or our phone conversations onto the service mentioned by Perry, we are being provided access to the means of production for affective or immaterial labor (Hardt argues that the former is a subset of the latter). This is what seems to be missing in Virno's claim that "thoughts and discourses function IN THEMSELVES as productive 'machines' in contemporary labor". Whether or not this is even conceivable (can we imagine what a thought that is productive in itself might be), the valorization of socialized immaterial labor relies upon privatized and commercialized material infrastructures: cell phone networks, internet providers, Googleplex (its server complexes). So the question then becomes is immaterial labor really that different from material labor. Both are social, both rely upon a material infrastructure (the means of production) that can be captured and privatized. There is an implicit denigration of material labor in these formulations -- as if physical labor is somehow less social and less of a resource for political struggle and "autonomy" than affective or symbolic labor -- which seems to recapitulate the very separation of mental and material that marxist accounts are supposed to challenge.

So that's the direction I was going in at the end of class -- but it is a tentative formulation, open to qualification and rethinking. I'd be interested in your thoughts/responses.