Activity

Given how different Boutang finds cognitive labor to be to physical labor, I question why it has to be thought as labor at all, rather than as the social activity of a quite different class. Boutang at least canvasses this possibility, in mentioning Berardi’s idea of a cognitariat and Ursula Huws’s…

Cognitive capitalism is not limited to the “tech” sector. As I argued in Telesthesia, if one looks at the top Fortune 500 companies, it is striking how much all of them now depend on something like cognitive labor, whether in the form of R+D, or logistics or the intangibles of managing the aura of …

Boutang is rather sparing with the term “neoliberal,” which is so often used now as a kind of linguistic operator to describe by contrast what this era is supposed to mean. The rise of finance is clearly a key feature of our times, but for Boutang (contra Brown) neither economic ideology nor financ…

Boutang is rather sparing with the term “neoliberal,” which is so often used now as a kind of linguistic operator to describe by contrast what this era is supposed to mean. The rise of finance is clearly a key feature of our times, but for Boutang (contra Brown) neither economic ideology nor financ…

Secondly, one might ask if post-Fordism is much of a way of defining the present moment. The fulcrum moment of the mid-twentieth century might be less Adorno’s first-hand discovery of the culture industry and more JD Bernal’s first-hand discovery of the application of science to production, includi…