Is he saying that common place is no more common place and there is not ‘people’ any more while “multitude” emerges? Is this radical transformation of the concept of public sphere from the traditional one articulated by Harbermas “to non-public public sphere and to a non-governmental public sphere, far from the myths and rituals of sovereignty”? Is Virno’s theory related with the experience Italians share, such as multiple fractions in regions, classes, and politics? Can his theory be applied to other historical, cultural, and political settings?
Virno seems to argue that everybody gets to be a thinker because they are obliged to think as one of multitude. Whether or not I agree with him, his idea is invoking and mind-blowing. I believe his theory is driving me to one of the forefronts of the changes we face. By the way, I have to ask myself: Do I see myself as being one of multitude? Do I find evidence of multitude existing? I think I can agree a bit with Virno because there seems to be some signs of multitude getting to work in network culture. To be sure, a variety set of chocolates is good because I can relish many different tastes. But Virno wants more than just smells and tastes. Can multitude become an upsetting power?
But I have to say from my observation, I could be wrong of course, that what I have noticed so far is that people, not multitude, are more likely engaged in collective activities driven by capitalism, sovereignty, and mass culture. This is probably why Virno and others suggest new ways of thinking. For now, I agree with him in saying “the notion of the multitude is extraordinarily rich in terms of allowing us to understand, to assess the modes of being of post-Ford subordinate labor, to understand some of the forms of behavior of that labor which at first sight seemed so enigmatic.”
Monday, October 1, 2007
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).
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).
The Multitude
This is just an attempt to provide a concrete example of what Virno deems the Multitude. To try to understand what Virno is getting at and how we can find concrete examples today we have to look at this theoretical death match of Hobbes vs. Spinoza, "people" vs. "multitudes".
"People" work within the system, the multitudes work outside of it. People work within the legitimacy of the state, multitudes are not able to be subsumed by an operational state and often act outside of it.
Virno writes, "The multitude, instead, is united by the risk which derives from not feeling at home," from being exposed omnilaterally to the world." So, the multitudes are connected though they act outside of the state.
An example that both works with Virno's conception and possibly challenges it is the Landless Workers' Movement of Brazil The group occupies unused land and establishes communal farms, houses, schools, and all sorts of other good things. In fact, you too can be a part of the "Multitude" by going to their website and becoming a "Friend" of the movement. But this is where this concept poses a problem for me.
The Landless Workers' Movement works because it has become legitimized within the state of Brazil. Reclaiming land without making some kind of cash purchase is certainly working outside of the laws established by certain groups within Brazil. As it turns out, working outside of these laws is more beneficial to the common good of the people that the Landless Workers' Movement serves. However, through the Landless Workers' Movement Party the movement is able to legalize and legitimize their activities. Their accomplishments also stem from the ability to get mass support among the Brazilian population, not among the netizens...
Those are my thoughts for now! La lucha continua!
-Eve
"People" work within the system, the multitudes work outside of it. People work within the legitimacy of the state, multitudes are not able to be subsumed by an operational state and often act outside of it.
Virno writes, "The multitude, instead, is united by the risk which derives from not feeling at home," from being exposed omnilaterally to the world." So, the multitudes are connected though they act outside of the state.
An example that both works with Virno's conception and possibly challenges it is the Landless Workers' Movement of Brazil The group occupies unused land and establishes communal farms, houses, schools, and all sorts of other good things. In fact, you too can be a part of the "Multitude" by going to their website and becoming a "Friend" of the movement. But this is where this concept poses a problem for me.
The Landless Workers' Movement works because it has become legitimized within the state of Brazil. Reclaiming land without making some kind of cash purchase is certainly working outside of the laws established by certain groups within Brazil. As it turns out, working outside of these laws is more beneficial to the common good of the people that the Landless Workers' Movement serves. However, through the Landless Workers' Movement Party the movement is able to legalize and legitimize their activities. Their accomplishments also stem from the ability to get mass support among the Brazilian population, not among the netizens...
Those are my thoughts for now! La lucha continua!
-Eve
the cultural logic of labor
One thing I find curious in the development of the concept of immaterial labor is that at the same time as labor is waxing affect, there is a waning of affect in cultural production, according to Jameson, who has it on good authority. Jameson wrote that art has moved from a certain political depth of high modernism (such as in the work of van Gogh) to a glossy surface lacking the ability to illicit response from subjects (such as in the work of Warhol) other than schizophrenic "intensities" of de-centered (or exterior) feeling. What was once oppositional to capital in art is now too tied up in the cultural logic of multinational capitalism to be oppositional (and affective), so the argument goes.
I am tempted to draw up some tentative links between this waxing/waning dialectic between affective labor and art. This may allow us to challenge some of the assumptions being made about immaterial labor. It seems that Virno's use of the concept of virtuosity provides the most clear link. Virtuosity is "the special capabilities of a performing artist" and "an activity which finds its own fulfillment" and "requires the presence of others." This last part is related to Hardt's version of politics as being in the presence of others and (maybe) in Adorno's being in the presence of art-objects. Although Virno doesn't say it explicitly, I want to say that virtuosity is dependent on (or at least strongly linked to) producing affect. "Contemporary production becomes 'virtuosic' (and thus political) precisely because it includes within itself linguistic experience as such," which means it derives from the basic human capacity to speak as a virtuous performance. And, according to Virno, the culture industry provides a sort of transfer station in which affect in culture or art moves onto other economic sectors and labor in general.
What are we to make of this movement of affect from culture to labor? Is it plausible that affect would show up in the very activity that was one of the first things subsumed by capital after being lost by art, which was most opposed (or autonomous in relation) to capital? Is the culture industry, which produces a being in the presence of spectacles, a proper link between the two?
Am I making up this dialectic in a desperate attempt to finish this post before midnight?
I am tempted to draw up some tentative links between this waxing/waning dialectic between affective labor and art. This may allow us to challenge some of the assumptions being made about immaterial labor. It seems that Virno's use of the concept of virtuosity provides the most clear link. Virtuosity is "the special capabilities of a performing artist" and "an activity which finds its own fulfillment" and "requires the presence of others." This last part is related to Hardt's version of politics as being in the presence of others and (maybe) in Adorno's being in the presence of art-objects. Although Virno doesn't say it explicitly, I want to say that virtuosity is dependent on (or at least strongly linked to) producing affect. "Contemporary production becomes 'virtuosic' (and thus political) precisely because it includes within itself linguistic experience as such," which means it derives from the basic human capacity to speak as a virtuous performance. And, according to Virno, the culture industry provides a sort of transfer station in which affect in culture or art moves onto other economic sectors and labor in general.
What are we to make of this movement of affect from culture to labor? Is it plausible that affect would show up in the very activity that was one of the first things subsumed by capital after being lost by art, which was most opposed (or autonomous in relation) to capital? Is the culture industry, which produces a being in the presence of spectacles, a proper link between the two?
Am I making up this dialectic in a desperate attempt to finish this post before midnight?
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
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
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?
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?
the Multitude: pure Vaseline?
But first -- another example of the material limits of immaterial labor? AT&T, rapidly trying to establish control over the "series of tubes" that comprise the Internet, apparently plans to shut down access to anyone who criticizes the company. Turns out we need more than just discourses, we need the material means of circulating them.
Back to the Multitude: is this just a matter of calling the people a multitude, or can we find some actual evidence for the claims that Virno is making about the contemporary condition. Can you think of any compelling evidence? What about compelling counter-evidence? How useful is the vocabulary that Virno develops -- can it be put to work? This is an essay, which means we're going to need to do a little work to flesh it out -- perhaps drawing on the references to the Fragment on Machines and the Economic Manuscripts we read last week.
Perhaps the most developed argument in the first half of the essay focuses on virtuosity as a means or bridging the realms of labor and politics -- I'm thinking this might be a good starting point for approaching an attempt to put this argument to work or to critique it.
Back to the Multitude: is this just a matter of calling the people a multitude, or can we find some actual evidence for the claims that Virno is making about the contemporary condition. Can you think of any compelling evidence? What about compelling counter-evidence? How useful is the vocabulary that Virno develops -- can it be put to work? This is an essay, which means we're going to need to do a little work to flesh it out -- perhaps drawing on the references to the Fragment on Machines and the Economic Manuscripts we read last week.
Perhaps the most developed argument in the first half of the essay focuses on virtuosity as a means or bridging the realms of labor and politics -- I'm thinking this might be a good starting point for approaching an attempt to put this argument to work or to critique it.
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