I don't wanna be self-valorizing

I wanted to try to put down on ‘paper’ my thoughts on ‘self-valorization’. I regret that I will engage with the contextualizing article from last week more than Virno’s “Grammar of the Multitude.” For those who already grasp the concept, my apologies for this; for those who don’t, proceed at your own risk – I fear I’m way off base.

It seems that self-valorization presupposes two ideas – (a) cooperation as immanent to immaterial labor and (b) a different notion of wealth.

“The cooperative aspect of immaterial labor is not imposed or organized from the outside...cooperation is completely immanent to the laboring activity itself. The fact calls into question the old notion by which labor power is conceived as variable capital, a force that is activated and made coherent only by capital, because the cooperative powers of labor power afford labor the possibility of valorizing itself” (112).

I still have a hard time understanding how the chicken came before the egg, but I think perhaps a passage from earlier in the article helps to clarify what collaborative immaterial production originated autonomously that capital tried to subsume at the beginning of the post-Fordist era. “The new configuration of capital is ... an attempt to capture and exploit the new sources of production and wealth opened up by the counter-culture revolution of the 1960s – the anti-conformism, experiments in lifestyle, and the expressive ‘transvaluation of values’ which stimulated the growth of affective, communicative, and intellectual forms of labor. The challenge for capital was now to dominate a new composition that had already been produced autonomously” (110-111).

With regards to wealth, self-valorization seems to depend on the wealth of the social individual: “The production of wealth must become identical to the production of social relationships, which is to say that humanity realizes its richness not in the commodities it consumes but through the depth and extensiveness of its productive interactions and associations” (117).

The foreword to Virno explains that in the post-Fordist economy, surplus value is no longer extracted from the labor materialized in a product, [surplus value] resides in the discrepancy between paid and unpaid work – the idle time of the mind that keeps enriching, unacknowledged, the fruits of immaterial labor.” It continues, “The more creative and adaptable the workers are – the more self-valorizing – the more surplus knowledge they can bring into the community at large” (12-13).

If surplus value resides in the discrepancy between paid and unpaid work – a new form of real subsumption of labor under capital – and workers are more self-valorizing the more creative, adaptable, and cooperative their labor, it seems to me that self-valorizing labor is ‘free’ labor: unwaged and enriching the fruits of immaterial labor.

This made more sense going in than coming out. I think I’m going to follow Virno’s advice – if I really want simplicity, all I have to do is drink up a bottle of red wine...