Activity

The connection between race and production hardly appears in Gilroy. I’m skeptical about his claim that “cars fudge any residual distinctions between material and semiotic, base and superstructure” (30). It might make more sense to think of cars à la Lazzarato as connected to an infrastructure that…

This all seems to confirm the work Eve Chiapello and Luc Boltanski did on how the ruling class responded to the challenge to its hegemony in the ’60s by resisting one line of attack yet incorporating the other. The line resisted was the labor critique, in the form of wildcat strikes and factory o…

Still, the neo-capitalism concept does touch on certain key features, to do with how subjectivity is machined rather than merely hailed into existence via language, as in Žižek. Lazzarato draws attention to the vacant language of org charts, graphs, budgets—one might add PowerPoints. Hierarchy is r…

Lazzarato: “it is never an individual who thinks” (44). And it is never a corporation that produces. The corporation appropriates the unassigned values of a machinic “commons,” as it were, “free of charge,” and captures it in the form of profit or rent. Just as capital appropriates the natural comm…

Lazzarato mentions all too briefly the role that property rights plays in tying the desubjectivized world of machines to the subject-producing world of discourse. “By ensuring that creation and production are uniquely the feats of ‘man,’ it uses the ‘world,’ emptied of all ‘soul,’ as its own ‘objec…