A provisional definition of immaterial labor

Immaterial labor is effort expended to produce value, extractable from the cultivation of relationships between people; workers rewards real or imagined, physical or phenomenal.

I have several pages of arguments to support this, thirteen discrete sub-points in all. I am reworking my defense of self-valorization, I would post them as well but they are still in the oven. I think I can square this with Multitude as well. I have floated trial balloons hinting at this argument, the following unit of analysis is my attempt to resolve the "tubes" issue for this definition of IL.

This was sub-point L from "Reasons to Prefer"

L. Handles the political economy side- the value is extracted from the cultivation of relationships- my interpretation handles this because the value in these relationships is extracted by third party observation. *The real way that value is extracted is through observation- here is a bizarre metaphor: they let us use their swimming hole in exchange for them getting to watch. They record all this and sell it to other voyeurs who have money they got from investors who tie all their limbidinal energy to a stock market, which at the end of the day is a complicated ritual performance that they simply watch and holler at. Laura Mulvey or Martin Jay perhaps, would have a few things to say about this system, it all derives from the politics of observation. This all seems to be about who gets to watch who for how long and for how much.* Everything inside the stars is even more provisional then the rest of this post, do with it as you will.

I was racked with anxiety about my conservative "D&G via H&N" argument, it really was a nostalgic attempt to get some kind of praxis out of this whole morass, Chad played the role of RoundUp quite effectively. D&G are so infatuated with capitalism that it would be worthy of a theory film noir. I am trying really hard to love these guys, but they are making it really hard. Virno is writing much more up my alley and using Debord which is a major reason why I am now less confident in my attempt to resolve the definitional deadlock that has befuddled our merry band. Before I started reading Multitude I was confident, now I am trying to tease out the linkage between self-valorization and the general intellect that the introduction promises, but never appears in the entire book in those terms. This is at the break between 12 and 13.

As for Niko's argument, I am less sure that this is a magical coherence but one of necessity- Kafka's mouse folk created their community and various knowledge through speech as they worked. This linkage with communication is where Situationism gets its gusto, performance would establish a functional link between the general intellect and capitalism. I will roll with my definition, not everything is extractable; the capitalist mode of production extracts through observation, like a peep show, its ability to truly know all the content is limited. There is also an internal limit in from the initial quote about "language games" as it would be a coherent system that would describe a set of particular conditions, there isn't one single language game that can sum up all communications.

--dan