by
Maurizio Lazzarato
translated by Ed Emery; updated by Paul
Colilli
A significant amount of empirical research has been
conducted concerning the new forms of the organization of work. This, combined
with a corresponding wealth of theoretical reflection, has made possible che
identification of a new conception of what work is nowadays and what new power
relations it implies.
An initial synthesis
of these results – framed in terms of an attempt to define the technical and
subjective-political composition of the working class – can be expressed in the
concept of immaterial labor, which is defined as the labor that produces
the informational and cultural concent of the commodity. The concept of
immaterial labor refers to two different aspects of labor. On the one
hand, as regards the "informational content" of the commodity, it refers
directly to the changes taking place in workers' labor processes in big
companies in the industrial and tertiary sectors, where the skills involved in
direct labor arc increasingly skills involving cybernetics and computer control
(and horizontal and vertical communication). On che other hand, as regards the
activity that produces the "cultural content" of the commodity,
immaterial labor involves a series of activities that arc not normally
recognized as "work" – in other words, the kinds of activities
involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions,
tastes, consumer norms, and, more strategically, public opinion. Once the
privileged domain of the bourgeoisie and its children, these activities have
since the end of the 1970s become thedomain of what we have come to define as
"mass intellectuality." The profound changes in these strategic
sectors have radically modified not only the composition, management, and
regulation of the workforce – the organization of production – but also, and
more deeply, the role and function of intellectuals and their activities within
society.
The "great
transformation" that began at the start of the 1970s has changed the very
terms in which the question is posed. Manual labor is increasingly coming to
involve procedures that could be defined as "intellectual," and the
new communications technologies increasingly require subjectivities that are
rich in knowledge. It is not simply that intellectual labor has become
subjected to the norms of capitalist production. What has happened is that a
new "mass intellectuality" has come into being, created out of a
combination of the demands of capitalist production and the forms of
"self-valorization" that the struggle against work has produced. The
old dichotomy between "mental and manual labor," or between
"material labor and immaterial labor," risks failing to grasp the new
nature of productive activity, which takes this separation on board and
transforms it. The split between conception and execution, between labor and
creativity, between author and audience, is simultaneously transcended within
the "labor process" and reimposed as political command within the
"process of valorization."
Twenty years of
restructuring of the big factories has led to a curious paradox. The various
different post-Fordist models have been constructed both on the defeat of the
Fordist worker and on the recognition of the centrality of (an ever
increasingly intellectualized) living labor within production. In today's large
restructured company, a worker's work increasingly involves, at various levels,
an ability to choose among different alternatives and thus a degree of
responsibility regarding decision making. The concept of "interface"
used by communications sociologists provides a fair definition of the
activities of this kind of worker – as an interface between different
functions, between different work teams, between different levels of the
hierarchy, and so forth. What modern management techniques are looking for is
for "the worker's soul to become part of the factory." The worker's
personality and subjectivity have to be made susceptible to organization and
command. It is around immateriality that the quality and quantity of labor are
organized. This transformation of working-class labor into a labor of control,
of handling information, into a decision-making capacity that involves the
investment of subjectivity, affects workers in varying ways according to their
positions within the factory hierarchy, but it is nevertheless present as an
irreversible process. Work can thus be defined as the capacity to activate and
manage productive cooperation. In this phase, workers are expected to become
"active subjects" in the coordination of the various functions of
production, instead of being subjected to it as simple command. We arrive at a
point where a collective learning process becomes the heart of productivity,
because it is no longer a matter of finding different ways of composing or
organizing already existing job functions, but of looking for new ones.
The problem,
however, of subjectivity and its collective form, its constitution and its
development, has immediately expressed itself as a clash between social classes
within the organization of work. I should point out that what I am describing
is not some Utopian vision of recomposition, but the very real terrain and
conditions of the conflict between social classes. The capitalist needs to find
an unmediated way of establishing command over subjectivity itself; the
prescription and definition of tasks transforms into a prescription of
subjectivities. The new slogan of Western societies is that we should all
"become subjects." Participative management is a technology of power,
a technology for creating and controlling the "subjective processes."
As it is no longer possible to confine subjectivity merely to tasks of
execution, it becomes necessary for the subject's competence in the areas of
management, communication, and creativity to be made compatible with the
conditions of "production for production's sake." Thus the slogan
"become subjects," far from eliminating the antagonism between
hierarchy and cooperation, between autonomy and command, actually re-poses the
antagonism at a higher level, because it both mobilizes and clashes with the
very personality of the individual worker. First and foremost, we have here a
discourse that is authoritarian: one has to express oneself, one has
to speak, communicate, cooperate, and so forth. The "tone" is
that of the people who were in executive command under Taylorization; all that
has changed is the content. Second, if it is no longer possible to lay down and
specify jobs and responsibilities rigidly (in the way that was once done with
"scientific" studies of work), but if, on the contrary, jobs now
require cooperation and collective coordination, then the subjects of that
production must be capable of communication – they must be active participants
within a work team. The communicational relationship (both vertically and
horizontally) is thus completely predetermined in both form and content; it is
subordinated to the "circulation of information" and is not expected
to be anything other. The subject becomes a simple relayer of codification and
decodification, whose transmitted messages must be "clear and free of
ambiguity," within a communications context that has been completely
normalized by management. Thenecessity of imposing command and the violence
that goes along with it here take on a normative communicative form.
The management
mandate to "become subjects of communication" threatens to be even
more totalitarian than the earlier rigid division between mental and manual
labor (ideas and execution), because capitalism seeks to involve even the
worker's personality and subjectivity within the production of value. Capital
wants a situation where command resides within the subject him- or herself, and
within the communicative process. The worker is to be responsible for his or
her own control and motivation within the work group without a foreman needing
to intervene, and the foreman's role is redefined into that of a facilitator.
In fact, employers are extremely worried by the double problem this creates: on
one hand, they are forced to recognize the autonomy and freedom of labor as the
only possible form of cooperation in production, but on the other hand, at the
same time, they are obliged (a life-and-death necessity for the capitalist) not
to "redistribute" the power that the new quality of labor and its
organization imply. Today's management thinking takes workers' subjectivity
into consideration only in order to codify it in line with the requirements of
production. And once again this phase of transformation succeeds in concealing
the fact that the individual and collective interests of workers and those of
the company are not identical.
I have defined
working-class labor as an abstract activity that nowadays involves the
application of subjectivity. In order to avoid misunderstandings, however, I
should add that this form of productive activity is not limited only to highly
skilled workers; it refers to a use value of labor power today, and, more
generally, to the form of activity of every productive subject within
postindustrial society. One could say that in the highly skilled, qualified
worker, the "communicational model" is already given, already
constituted, and that its potentialities are already defined. In the young
worker, however, the "precarious" worker, and the unemployed youth,
we are dealing with a pure virtuality, a capacity that is as yet undetermined
but that already shares all the characteristics of postindustrial productive
subjectivity. The virtuality of this capacity is neither empty nor ahistoric;
it is, rather, an opening and a potentiality that have as their historical
origins and antecedents the "struggle against work" of the Fordist
worker and, in more recent times, the processes of socialization, educational
formation, and cultural self-valorization.
This transformation
of the world of work appears even more evident when one studies the social
cycle of production: the "diffuse factory" and decentralization of
production on the one hand and the various forms of tertiarizarion on the
other. Here one can measure the extent to which the cycle of immaterial labor
has come to assume a strategic role within the global organization of
production. The various activities of research, conceptualization, management
of human resources, and so forth, together with all the various tertiary
activities, are organized within computerized and multimedia networks. These
are the terms in which we have to understand the cycle of production and the
organization of labor. The integration of scientific labor into industrial and
tertiary labor has become one of the principal sources of productivity, and it
is becoming a growing factor in the cycles of production that organize it.
All the
characteristics of the postindustrial economy (both in industry and society as
a whole) are highly present within the classic forms of "immaterial"
production: audiovisual production, advertising, fashion, the production of
software, photography, cultural activities, and so forth. The activities of
this kind of immaterial labor force us to question the classic definitions of
work and workforce, because they combine the results of various
different types of work skill: intellectual skills, as regards the
cultural-informational content; manual skills for the ability to combine
creativity, imagination, and technical and manual labor; and entrepreneurial
skills in the management of social relations and the structuring of that social
cooperation of which they are a part. This immaterial labor constitutes itself
in forms that are immediately collective, and we might say that it
exists only in the form of networks and flows. The organization of the cycle of
production of immaterial labor (because this is exactly what it is, once we
abandon our factoryist prejudices – a cycle of production) is not obviously
apparent to the eye, because it is not defined by the four walls of a factory.
The location in which it operates is outside in the society at large, at a
territorial level that we could call "the basin of immaterial labor."
Small and sometimes very small "productive units" (often consisting
of only one individual) are organized for specific ad hoc projects, and may
exist only for the duration of those particular jobs. The cycle of production
comes into operation only when it is required by the capitalist; once the job
has been done, the cycle dissolves back into the networks and flows that make
possible the reproduction and enrichment of its productive capacities.
Precariousness, hyperexploitation, mobility, and hierarchy are the most obvious
characteristics of metropolitan immaterial labor. Behind the label of the
independent "self-employed" worker, what we actually find is an
intellectual
proletarian, but who
is recognized as such only by the employers who exploit him or her. It is worth
noting that in this kind of working existence it becomes increasingly difficult
to distinguish leisure time from work time. In a sense, life becomes
inseparable from work.This labor form is also characterized by real managerial
functions that consist in (1) a certain ability to manage its social relations
and (2) the eliciting of social cooperation within the structures of the basin
of immaterial labor.
The quality of this
kind of labor power is thus defined not only by its professional capacities
(which make possible the construction of the cultural-informational content of
the commodity), but also by its ability to "manage" its own activity
and act as the coordinator of the immaterial labor of others (production and
management of the cycle). This immaterial labor appears as a real mutation of
"living labor." Here we are quite far from the Taylorist model of
organization.
Immaterial labor
finds itself at the crossroads (or rather, it is the interface) of a new relationship
between production and consumption. The activation of both productive
cooperation and the social relationship with the consumer is materialized
within and by the process of communication. The role of immaterial labor is to
promote continual innovation in the forms and conditions of communication (and
thus in work and consumption). It gives form to and materializes needs, the
imaginary, consumer tastes, and so forth, and these products in turn become
powerful producers of needs, images, and tastes. The particularity of the
commodity produced through immaterial labor (its essential use value being
given by its value as informational and cultural content) consists in the fact
that it is not destroyed in the act of consumption, but rather it enlarges,
transforms, and creates the "ideological" and cultural environment of
the consumer. This commodity does not produce the physical capacity of labor
power; instead, it transforms the person who uses it. Immaterial labor produces
first and foremost a "social relationship" (a relationship of
innovation, production, and consumption). Only if it succeeds in this
production does its activity have an economic value. This activity makes
immediately apparent something that material production had "hidden,"
namely, that labor produces not only commodities, but first and foremost it
produces the capital relation.
My working
hypothesis, then, is that the cycle of immaterial labor takes as its starting
point a social labor power that is independent and able to organize both its
own work and its relations with business entities. Industry does not form or
create this new labor power, but simply takes it on board and adapts it.
Industry's control over this new labor power presupposes the independent
organization and "free entrepreneurial activity" of the labor power.
Advancing further on this terrain brings us into the debate on the nature of
work in the post-Fordist phase of the organization of labor. Among economists,
the predominant view of this problematic can be expressed in a single
statement: immaterial labor operates within the forms of organization that the
centralization of industry allows. Moving from this common basis, there are two
differing schools of thought: one is the extension of neoclassical analysis;
the other is that of systems theory.In the former, the attempt to solve the
problem comes through a redefinition of the problematic of the market. It is
suggested that in order to explain the phenomena of communication and the new
dimensions of organization one should introduce not only cooperation and
intensity of labor, but also other analytic variables (anthropological
variables? immaterial variables?) and that on this basis one might introduce other
objectives of optimization and so forth. In fact, the neoclassical model has
considerable difficulty in freeing itself from the coherence constraints
imposed by the theory of general equilibrium. The new phenomenologies of labor,
the new dimensions of organization, communication, the potentiality of
spontaneous synergies, the autonomy of the subjects involved, and the
independence of the networks were neither foreseen nor foreseeable by a general
theory that believed that material labor and an industrial economy were
indispensable.
Today, with the new
data available, we find the microeconomy in revolt against the macroeconomy,
and the classical model is corroded by a new and irreducible anthropological
reality.
Systems theory, by
eliminating the constraint of the market and giving pride of place to
organization, is more open to the new phenomenology of labor and in particular
to the emergence of immaterial labor. In more developed systemic theories,
organization is conceived as an ensemble of factors, both material and
immaterial, both individual and collective, that can permit a given group to
reach objectives. The success of this organizational process requires
instruments of regulation, either voluntary or automatic. It becomes possible
to look at things from the point of view of social synergies, and immaterial
labor can be taken on board by virtue of its global efficacy. These viewpoints,
however, are still tied to an image of the organization of work and its social
territory within which effective activity from an economic viewpoint (in other
words, the activity conforming to the objective) must inevitably be considered
as a surplus in relation to collective cognitive mechanisms. Sociology and
labor economics, being systemic disciplines, are both incapable of detaching
themselves from this position.
I believe that an
analysis of immaterial labor and a description of its organization can lead us
beyond the presuppositions of business theory – whether in its neoclassical school or its systems theory school.
It can lead us to define, at a territorial level, a space for a radical
autonomy of the productive synergies of immaterial labor. We can thus move
against the old schools of thought to establish, decisively, the viewpoint of
an "anthropo-sociology" that is constitutive.
Once this viewpoint
comes to dominate within social production, we find that we have an
interruption in the continuity of models of production. By this I mean that,
unlike the position held by many theoreticians of post-Fordism, I do not
believe that this new labor power is merely functional to a new historical
phase of capitalism and its processes of accumulation and reproduction. This
labor power is the product of a "silent revolution" taking place
within the anthropological realities of work and within the reconfiguration of
its meanings. Waged labor and direct subjugation (to organization) no longer
constitute the principal form of the contractual relationship between
capitalist and worker. A polymorphous self-employed autonomous work has
emerged as the dominant form, a kind of "intellectual worker" who is
him or herself an entrepreneur, inserted within a market that is constantly
shifting and within networks that are changeable in time and space.
Up to this point I
have been analyzing and constructing the concept of immaterial labor from a
point of view that could be defined, so to speak, as “microeconomic". If
now we consider immaterial labor within the globality of the production cycle,
of which it is the strategic stage, we will be able to see a series of
characteristics of post-Taylorist production that have not yet been taken into
consideration.
I want to
demonstrate in particular how the process of valorization tends to be
identified with the process of the production of social communication and how
the two stages (valorization and communication) immediately have a social and
territorial dimension. The concept of immaterial labor presupposes and results
in an enlargement of productive cooperation that even includes the production
and reproduction of communication and hence of its most important contents:
subjectivity.
If Fordism
integrated consumption into the cycle of the reproduction of capital,
post-Fordism integrates communication into it. From a strictly economic point
of view, the cycle of reproduction of immaterial labor dislocates the
production-consumption relationship as it is defined as much by the
"virtuous Keynesian circle" as by the Marxist reproduction schemes of
the second volume of Capital. Now, rather than speaking of the toppling
of "supply and demand," we should speak about a redefinition of the
production-consumption relationship. As we saw earlier, the consumer is
inscribed in the manufacturing of the product from its conception. The consumer
is no longer limited to consuming commodities (destroying them in the act of
consumption). On the contrary, his or her consumption should be productive in
accordance to the necessary conditions and the new products. Consumption is
then first of all a consumption of information. Consumption is no longer only
the "realization" of a product, but a real and proper social process
that for the moment is defined with the term communication.
Large-Scale
Industry and Services
To recognize the new
characteristics of the production cycle of immaterial labor, we should compare
it with the production of large-scale industry and services. If the cycle of
immaterial production immediately demonstrates to us the secret of
post-Taylorist production (that is to say, that social communication and the
social relationship that constitutes it become productive), then it would be
interesting to examine how these new social relationships innervate even
industry and services, and how they oblige us to reformulate and reorganize
even the classical forms of "production."
The postindustrial
enterprise and economy are founded on the manipulation of information. Rather
than ensuring (as nineteenth-century enterprises did) the surveillance of the
inner workings of the production process and the supervision of the markets of
raw materials (labor included), business is focused on the terrain outside of
the production process: sales and the relationship with the consumer. It always
leans more toward commercialization and financing than toward production. Prior
to being manufactured, a product must be sold, even in "heavy"
industries such as automobile manufacturing; a car is put into production only
after the sales network orders it. This strategy is based on the production and
consumption of information. It mobilizes important communication and marketing
strategies in order to gather information (recognizing the tendencies of the
market) and circulate it (constructing a market). In the Taylorist and Fordist
systems of production, by introducing the mass consumption of standardized
commodities, Ford could still say that the consumer has the choice between one
black model T5 and another black model T5. "Today the standard commodity
is no longer the recipe to success, and the automobile industry itself, which
used to be the champion of the great 'low price' series, would want to boast
about having become a neoindustry of singularization" – and quality.1
For the majority of businesses, survival involves the permanent search for new
commercial openings that lead to the identification of always more ample or
differentiated product lines. Innovation is no longer subordinated only to the
rationalization of labor, but also to commercial imperatives. It seems, then,
that the postindustrial commodity is the result of a creative process that
involves both the producer and the consumer.
If from industry
proper we move on to the "services" sector (large banking services,
insurance, and so forth), the characteristics of the process I have described
appear even more clearly. We are witnessing today not really a growth of
services, but rather a development of the "relations of service." The
move beyond the Taylorist organization of services is characterized by the
integration of the relationship between production and consumption, where in
fact the consumer intervenes in an active way in the composition of the
product. The product "service" becomes a social construction and a
social process of "conception" and innovation. In service industries,
the "back-office" tasks (the classic work of services) have diminished
and the tasks of the "front office" (the relationship with clients)
have grown. There has been thus a shift of human resources toward the outer
part of business. As recent sociological analyses tell us, the more a product
handled by the service sector is characterized as an immaterial product, the
more it distances itself from the model of industrial organization of the
relationship between production and consumption. The change in this
relationship between production and consumption has direct consequences for
the organization of the Taylorist labor of production of services, because it
draws into question both the contents of labor and the division of labor (and
thus the relationship between conception and execution loses its unilateral
character). If the product is defined through the intervention of the consumer,
and is therefore in permanent evolution, it becomes always more difficult to
define the norms of the production of services and establish an
"objective" measure of productivity.
All of these
characteristics of postindustrial economics (present both in large-scale
industry and the tertiary sector) are accentuated in the form of properly
"immaterial" production. Audiovisual production, advertising,
fashion, software, the management of territory, and so forth are all defined
by means of the particular relationship between production and its market or
consumers. Here we are at the furthest point from the Taylorist model.
Immaterial labor continually creates and modifies the forms and conditions of
communication, which in turn acts as the interface that negotiates the
relationship between production and consumption. As I noted earlier,
immaterial labor produces first and foremost a social relation – it produces
not only commodities, but also the capital relation.
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. The process by which
the "social" (and what is even more social, that is, language,
communication, and so forth) becomes "economic" has not yet been
sufficiently studied. In effect, on the one hand, we are familiar with an
analysis of the production of subjectivity defined as the constitutive
"process" specific to a "relation to the self with respect to
the forms of production particular to knowledge and power (as in a certain vein
of poststructuralist French philosophy), but this analysis never intersects
sufficiently with the forms of capitalist valorization. On the other hand, in
the 1980s a network of economists and sociologists (and before them the Italian
postworkerist tradition) developed an extensive analysis of the "social
form of production," but that analysis does not integrate sufficiently
the production of subjectivity as the content of valorization. Now, the
post-Taylorist mode of production is defined precisely by putting subjectivity
to work both in the activation of productive cooperation and in the production
of the "cultural" contents of commodities.
But how is the
production process of social communication formed? How does the production of
subjectivity take place within this process? How does the production of
subjectivity become the production of the consumer/communicator and its capac
ities to consume and communicate? What role does immaterial labor have in this
process? As I have already said, my hypothesis is this: the process of the
production of communication tends to become immediately the process of
valorization. If in the past communication was organized fundamentally by
means of language and the institutions of ideological and literary/artistic
production, today, because it is invested with industrial production,
communication is reproduced by means of specific technological schemes
(knowledge, thought, image, sound, and language reproduction technologies) and
by means of forms of organization and "management" that are bearers
of a new mode of production.
It is more useful, in
attempting to grasp the process of the formation of social communication and
its subsumption within the "economic," to use, rather than the
"material" model of production, the "aesthetic" model that
involves author, reproduction, and reception. This model reveals aspects that
traditional economic categories tend to obscure and that, as I will show,
constitute the "specific differences" of the post-Taylorist means of
production.2 The "aesthetic/ideological" model of
production will be transformed into a small-scale sociological model with all
the limits and difficulties that such a sociological transformation brings. The
model of author, reproduction, and reception requires a double transformation:
in the first place, the three stages of this creation process must be
immediately characterized by their social form; in the second place, the three
stages must be understood as the articulations of an actual productive cycle.3
The
"author" must lose its individual dimension and be transformed into
an industrially organized production process (with a division of labor,
investments, orders, and so forth), "reproduction" becomes a mass
reproduction organized according to the imperatives of profitability, and the
audience ("reception") tends to become the consumer/communicator. In
this process of socialization and subsumption within the economy of
intellectual activity the "ideological" product tends to assume the
form of a commodity. I should emphasize, however, that the subsumption of this
process under capitalist logic and the transformation of its products into
commodities does not abolish the specificity of aesthetic production, that is
to say, the creative relationship between author and audience.
Allow me to
underline briefly the specific differences of the "stages"
that make up the production cycle of immaterial labor (immaterial labor itself,
its "ideological/ commodity products," and the
"public/consumer") in relation to the classical forms of the reproduction
of "capital."
As far as immaterial
labor being an "author" is concerned, it is necessary to emphasize the
radical autonomy of its productive synergies. As we have seen, immaterial
labor forces us to question the classical definitions of work and workforce,
because it results from a synthesis of different types of know-how: intellectual
skills, manual skills, and entrepreneurial skills. Immaterial labor constitutes
itself in immediately collective forms that exist as networks and flows. The
subjugation of this form of cooperation and the "use value" of these
skills to capitalist logic does not take away the autonomy of the constitution
and meaning of immaterial labor. On the contrary, it opens up antagonisms and
contradictions that, to use once again a Marxist formula, demand at least a
"new form of exposition."
The
"ideological product" becomes in every respect a commodity. The term
ideological does not characterize the product as a
"reflection" of reality, as false or true consciousness of reality.
Ideological products produce, on the contrary, new stratifications of reality;
they are the intersection where human power, knowledge, and action meet. New
modes of seeing and knowing demand new technologies, and new technologies
demand new forms of seeing and knowing. These ideological products are
completely internal to the processes of the formation of social communication;
that is, they are at once the results and the prerequisites of these processes.
The ensemble of ideological products constitutes the human ideological
environment. Ideological products are transformed into commodities without
ever losing their specificity; that is, they are always addressed to
someone, they are "ideally signifying," and thus they pose the
problem of "meaning."
The general public
tends to become the model for the consumer (audience / client). The public (in
the sense of the user – the reader, the music listener, the television
audience) whom the author addresses has as such a double productive function.
In the first place, as the addressee of the ideological product, the public is
a constitutive element of the production process. In the second place, the
public is productive by means of the reception that gives the product "a
place in life" (in other words, integrates it into social communication)
and allows it to live and evolve. Reception is thus, from this point of
view, a creative act and an integrative part of the product. The
transformation of the product into a commodity cannot abolish this double
process of "creativity"; it must rather assume it as it is, and
attempt to control it and subordinate it to its own values.
What the
transformation of the product into a commodity cannot remove, then, is the character
of event, the open process of creation that is established between
immaterial labor and the public and organized by communication. If the
innovation in immaterial production is introduced by this open process of
creation, the entrepreneur, in order to further consumption and its perpetual
renewal, will be constrained to draw from the "values" that the
public/consumer produces. These values presuppose the modes of being, modes of
existing, and forms of life that support them. From these considerations there
emerge two principal consequences. First, values are "put to work."
The transformation of the ideological product into a commodity distorts or
deflects the social imaginary that is produced in the forms of life, but at the
same time, commodity production must recognize itself as powerless as far as
its own production is concerned. The second consequence is that the forms of
life (in their collective and cooperative forms) are now the source of
innovation.
The analysis of the
different "stages" of the cycle of immaterial labor permits me to
advance the hypothesis that what is "productive" is the whole of the
social relation (here represented by the author-work-audience relationship)
according to modalities that directly bring into play the "meaning."
The specificity of this type of production not only leaves its imprint on the
"form" of the process of production by establishing a new
relationship between production and consumption, but it also poses a problem
of legitimacy for the capitalist appropriation of this process. This
cooperation can in no case be predetermined by economics, because it deals with
the very life of society. "Economics" can only appropriate the forms
and products of this cooperation, normalizing and standardizing them. The creative
and innovative elements are tightly linked to the values that only the forms of
life produce. Creativity and productivity in postindustrial societies reside,
on the one hand, in the dialectic between the forms of life and values they
produce and, on the other, in the activities of subjects that constitute them.
The legitimation that the (Schumpeterian) entrepreneur found in his or her
capacity for innovation has lost its foundation. Because the capitalist
entrepreneur does not produce the forms and contents of immaterial labor, he or
she does not even produce innovation. For economics there remains only the
possibility of managing and regulating the activity of immaterial labor and
creating some devices for the control and creation of the public/consumer by
means of the control of communication and information technologies and their
organizational processes.
These brief
considerations permit us to begin questioning the model of creation and
diffusion specific to intellectual labor and to get beyond the concept of
creativity as an expression of "individuality" or as the patrimony
of the "superior" classes. The works of Simmel and Bakhtin, conceived
in a time when immaterial production had just begun to become "productive,"
present us with two completely different ways of posing the relationship
between immaterial labor and society. The first, Simmel's, remain completely
invested in the division between manual labor and intellectual labor and give
us a theory of the creativity of intellectual labor. The second, Bakhtin's, in
refusing to accept the capitalist division of labor as a given, elaborate a
theory of social creativity. Simmel, in effect, explains the function of
"fashion" by means of the phenomenon of imitation or distinction as
regulated and commanded by class relationships. Thus the superior levels of the
middle classes are the ones that create fashion, and the lower classes attempt
to imitate them. Fashion here functions like a barrier that incessantly comes
up because it is incessantly battered down. What is interesting for this
discussion is that, according to this conception, the immaterial labor of
creation is limited to a specific social group and is not diffused except
through imitation. At a deeper level, this model accepts the division of labor
founded on the opposition between manual and intellectual labor that has as its
end the regulation and "mystification" of the social process of
creation and innovation. If this model had some probability of corresponding to
the dynamics of the market of immaterial labor at the moment of the birth of
mass consumption (whose effects Simmel very intelligently anticipates), it
could not be utilized to account for the relationship between immaterial labor
and consumer-public in postindustrial society. Bakhtin, on the contrary,
defines immaterial labor as the superseding of the division between
"material labor and intellectual labor" and demonstrates how
creativity is a social process. In fact, the work on "aesthetic production"
of Bakhtin and the rest of the Leningrad circle has this same social focus.
This is the line of
investigation that seems most promising for developing a theory of the social
cycle of immaterial production.
Notes
1. Yves Clot, "Renouveau de l'industrialisme et
activite philosophique," Futur anterieur, no. 10(1992);
2. Both the creative and the social elements of this
production encourage me to venture the use of the "aesthetic
model." It is interesting to see how one could arrive at this new concept
of labor by starting eitherfrom artistic activity (following the situationists)
or from the traditional activity of the factory (following Italian workerist
theories), both relying on the very Marxist concept of "living
labor."
3. Walter Benjamin has already analyzed how since the
end of the nineteenth century both artistic production and reproduction, along
with its perception, have assumed collective forms. I cannot pause here to
consider his works, but they are certainly fundamental for any genealogy of immaterial
labor and its forms of reproduction.
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