Monday, September 24, 2007

Subjectivity vs agency

To be honest, I found Lazzarato's article a bit difficult to follow: the language tends to be rather abstruse and the text sometimes lacks in coherence (some ideas are repeated again and again, sometimes he contradicts himself, and even the paragraph structure is a mess). However, what I found interesting in both Virno and Lazzarato's articles was the ambivalent way in which they describe power/class relations in the context of "immaterial labour" and post-Fordist economics. On the one hand, they assert the autonomous potential of immaterial labour. For instance, Lazzarato argues that an "analysis of immaterial labour" can "lead us to define [...] a space for radical autonomy of the productive synergies of immaterial labour". He adds that "a polymorphous self-employed autonomous work has emerged as the dominant form, a kind of 'intellectual worker' who is him or herself an entrepreneur". On the other hand, he also suggests that the new labour relations also stifle agency: "the fact that immaterial labor produces subjectivity and economic value at the same time demonstrates how capitalist production has invaded our lives and has broken down all the oppositions among economy, power and knowledge". Virno makes a similar point on capitalist appropriation of subjectivity: "the subversion of capitalist relations of production can only manifest itself through the institution of a public sphere outside the state and of a political community that hinges on the general intellect".

So, in simple terms, does that mean that capitalism in crisis mutates and appropriates forms of resistance?

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