a pox on your techno-house

My flights home from Pittsburgh were made of the stuff that gets an average comedian by these days. The first flight came fully equipped with a screaming newbie in my aisle. Damn all you breeders, I thought. The second flight has much more to do with this class and Mark's question than a screaming child. I sat next to a chatty Cathy -- the kind of person who continues to talk to you even when you have your Times of the Technoculture book as close to your nose as possible. Since he made it perfectly clear that I would not be reading gently into that good flight, I decided to talk to him about what I was reading and our class. Here is what technology and immaterial labor meant to this guy (a financial panther, er, I mean financial planner) from Ohio:

The planner guy told me that he built a house that is technologically smart. The first smart thing he told me about was the surveillance system (cameras and motion detectors) that watches over the perimeter and the interior. If the motion detector detects something moving, then an alert is sent to the house (or to his mobile phone if he is away). At his house, he can turn any one of his many TVs to a certain channel to watch the camera. He told me his wife (who was sitting a row up from him for some reason, perhaps so she could get a break from his constant chattering) was very skeptical of the need for all this technology at his home until she was at home one night alone and the alarm went off. She was relieved when she checked the surveillance feed, or something. I don't know if this is a true story or just one of those justifications men make about the need for all this techno-security. Anyway, his house calls him at work for the most inane reasons...to adjust the temperature, to let him know if the pilot light goes out in the furnace, etc. He in turn can "talk back" to the house, via his phone or computer, to tell it what to do. He related his smart house to his business' software system that keeps track of client information so that he can seem more personally connected each time he gets a call.

Although I am tempted to make a rather crude analogy that his house has taken up some of the tasks of a 1950s housewife and a better-than-average guard dog, I think that would be straying a bit too far from the task at hand. And besides, I think he likes it when his house calls (I wonder if he pines for those calls...)

Which brings me to my reading of Lazzarato, who offers a rich theoretical development of immaterial labor, an interesting critique of same, but a poor model for its potential application.

"The management mandate to 'become subjects of communication' threatens to be even more totalitarian than the earlier rigid division between mental and manual labor... because capitalism seeks to involve even the worker's personality and subjectivity within the production of value. 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..."

Thinking of this quote reminds me of chatty Cathy's "productive" house, and Foucault's treatment of Bentham and the ultimate objective of the panopticon. I think this notion of the subsumption of subjectivity is central to D-W and Lazzarato, but I keep getting stuck at this point. It might be that I don't trust political economists to be good theorists of subjectivity.

"I have defined working-class labor as an abstract activity that nowadays involves the application of subjectivity." What are we to make of this definition, which relies on a view of subjectivity that seems to me to be unproblematized? That is, if we are to agree with Lazzarato's critique of the increased self-regulation that immaterial labor brings to the production of value, should we get our story straight about how subjectivity is structured?

That might be a minor point, but Lazzarato's model of immaterial labor presents me with the most difficulties. "Immaterial labor continually creates and modifies the forms and conditions of communication, which in turn acts as the interface that negotiates the relationship between production and consumption." I have tried to draw this up as a model, but I find that it is either too vague or abstract. Perhaps if we are able to draw a model, we can see how "immaterial labor" becomes (or is used in the service of) material labor through creation and modification. We could also see where the cultural and informational content works as aspects of immaterial labor and how.