Communication is a machine

I am left with an uneasiness about Mark's question last week concerning how communication or a thought can be a "machine" or productive in itself. Let me set up the quote from Virno and offer a reading:

The ‘general intellect’ includes formal and informal knowledge, imagination, ethical tendencies, mentalities and ‘language games’. Thoughts and discourses function in themselves as productive ‘machines’ in contemporary labour and do not need to take on a mechanical body or an electronic soul.

I believe this is easier understood once placed alongside Lazzarato; they both speak to a remarkable idea - not that capital produces something new (immaterial) but that we must turn to some novel, heuristic concepts to get at capital's new self-propagating organization of labor:

If production today is directly the production of a social relation, then the "raw material" of immaterial labor is subjectivity and the "ideological" environment in which this subjectivity lives and reproduces. The production of subjectivity ceases to be only an instrument of social control (for the reproduction of mercantile relationships) and becomes directly productive, because the goal of our postindustrial society is to construct the consumer/ communicator—and to construct it as "active." Immaterial workers (those who work in advertising, fashion, marketing, television, cybernetics, and so forth) satisfy a demand by the consumer and at the same time establish that demand. 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. The process of social communication (and its principal content, the production of subjectivity) becomes here directly productive because in a certain way it "produces" production.

Both passages here concern not merely the production of immaterial or affective labor (though this may certainly be the case). These theorists instead desire to expose capital's production of the conditions of its own possibility; capitalism somehow mysteriously always re-produces itself. To say that 'social communication "produces" production' and that discourses are "machines" is to begin to offer a non-instrumentalist take on production. Pure exploitation and surplus extraction metaphors will no longer suffice since someone does the instrumental, purposive extracting. But here, the machine of capital in its entirety does the extracting by reorganizing itself to incorporate all relations, all communication, disagreements, preferences, etc... into the service of capital. Everything is extractable. Content of communication can thus become irrelevant, potentially at least. A social relation that reproduces the relationship of productivity itself will be useful to capital. Communication is a logic that is useful, not to anyone in particular, but to an organizational scheme generally. The very idea of having a general intellect is thus a useful function of capital.. as long as production can be reproduced in the relation of communication. This is why Virno quotes Marx on the general intellect:

‘The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it’.

Capitalism produces the general intellect and then the general intellect starts to produce the conditions that make capitalism thrive. Its spiraling out of control is precisely the exaggerated effect of hyper-control.

Now, why does communication magically cohere to a reproduction of the general intellect?