63
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, including information science.11 The world of the contemporary media and its idle talk grows more out of the latter than the former. The state may be in crisis more because of a technical infrastructure that assumes some of its functions than because of language-based labor.12 That language-based labor is more an exceptional experience of the overdeveloped world than a general characteristic.
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, including information science.11 The world of the contemporary media and its idle talk grows more out of the latter than the former. The state may be in crisis more because of a technical infrastructure that assumes some of its functions than because of language-based labor.12 That language-based labor is more an exceptional experience of the overdeveloped world than a general characteristic.
66
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 financial speculation is causative. The rise of finance is what has to be explained.
The explanation is an interesting one. With the conversion of intellectual activities into tradable assets, work dematerialized, and the contours of the company became unclear. Financialization is a way of assessing the value of production when production is no longer just about labor and things. Finance both predicts and actualizes futures in which private companies extract value from the knowledge society, where the boundaries of who “owns” what can never be clear.
[...]
Those are the problems cognitive capitalism appears completely unable to solve. What it did solve, after a fashion, is the problem of the network effect. Value creation now relies on public goods, on complex processes, and things that it is very difficult to price. Financialization is a response to that complexity.
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 financial speculation is causative. The rise of finance is what has to be explained.
The explanation is an interesting one. With the conversion of intellectual activities into tradable assets, work dematerialized, and the contours of the company became unclear. Financialization is a way of assessing the value of production when production is no longer just about labor and things. Finance both predicts and actualizes futures in which private companies extract value from the knowledge society, where the boundaries of who “owns” what can never be clear.
[...]
Those are the problems cognitive capitalism appears completely unable to solve. What it did solve, after a fashion, is the problem of the network effect. Value creation now relies on public goods, on complex processes, and things that it is very difficult to price. Financialization is a response to that complexity.
68
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 brands and product lines.7 Moreover, this is not a simple story of the exogenous development of the forces of production. This is not a revival of the “information society” thesis of Daniel Bell and others, a theory which shied away from the complexities of capitalism. There’s a story here about power and hegemony, not just pure linear tech growth.
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 brands and product lines.7 Moreover, this is not a simple story of the exogenous development of the forces of production. This is not a revival of the “information society” thesis of Daniel Bell and others, a theory which shied away from the complexities of capitalism. There’s a story here about power and hegemony, not just pure linear tech growth.
69
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 of a cybertariat, but the least settled part of attempts to think the current mode of production seems to me to be questions of the classes it produces and which in turn reproduce it.10
The symptom of this for me is the emergence of new kinds of property relation, so-called “intellectual property,” which became private property rights, and which were extended to cover an ever wider range of information products. Boutang is aware of this:
One of the symptoms indicating that both the mode of production and the capitalist relations of production are changing is the importance assumed nowadays by institutional legal issues. Never has there been so much talk of property rights, by way of contesting them as well as by way of redefining them. (47)
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 of a cybertariat, but the least settled part of attempts to think the current mode of production seems to me to be questions of the classes it produces and which in turn reproduce it.10
The symptom of this for me is the emergence of new kinds of property relation, so-called “intellectual property,” which became private property rights, and which were extended to cover an ever wider range of information products. Boutang is aware of this:
One of the symptoms indicating that both the mode of production and the capitalist relations of production are changing is the importance assumed nowadays by institutional legal issues. Never has there been so much talk of property rights, by way of contesting them as well as by way of redefining them. (47)
73
Boutang sees the development of work after Fordism as being about coopting the rebellion from work’s alienated form.17
Work comes to dress itself in the clothes of the artist or of the university. The values of creativity only become capable of being exploited by an intelligent capitalism to the extent that they were promoted as a value, first experimentally and then as a norm of living. (88)
Hence, at least in part, “the ‘hacker’ individual is closer to the creative artist and the ivory-tower professor than to the risk-taker or the possessive individualist” (90). This might not however take full account of the rise of the “Brogrammer,” product of elite American universities who studied programming rather than go to business school, and for whom tech is just a means to get into business. The ethnographic realities of class are always complicated.
Even so, while start-up culture is designed to shape a kind of petit-bourgeois personality, not every hacker is persuaded by this. Many will discover that there is now a kind of second-degree exploitation, not of labor per se but of one’s capacity to hack, to invent, to transform information. Who knows? Some might even question the split that this emerging mode of production forces between labor and creation, which was the basis of Asger Jorn’s very prescient situationist critique of political economy.18 For Boutang this new division is like that between the “free” worker and the slave in mercantilist capitalism—which I must point out is a division between two different classes.
Boutang sees the development of work after Fordism as being about coopting the rebellion from work’s alienated form.17
Work comes to dress itself in the clothes of the artist or of the university. The values of creativity only become capable of being exploited by an intelligent capitalism to the extent that they were promoted as a value, first experimentally and then as a norm of living. (88)
Hence, at least in part, “the ‘hacker’ individual is closer to the creative artist and the ivory-tower professor than to the risk-taker or the possessive individualist” (90). This might not however take full account of the rise of the “Brogrammer,” product of elite American universities who studied programming rather than go to business school, and for whom tech is just a means to get into business. The ethnographic realities of class are always complicated.
Even so, while start-up culture is designed to shape a kind of petit-bourgeois personality, not every hacker is persuaded by this. Many will discover that there is now a kind of second-degree exploitation, not of labor per se but of one’s capacity to hack, to invent, to transform information. Who knows? Some might even question the split that this emerging mode of production forces between labor and creation, which was the basis of Asger Jorn’s very prescient situationist critique of political economy.18 For Boutang this new division is like that between the “free” worker and the slave in mercantilist capitalism—which I must point out is a division between two different classes.
74
Perhaps one could even open up the question of whether the tensions within the ruling class point toward the formation of a different kind of ruling class. One part of the ruling class really insists on the enclosure of information within strict private property forms, while another part does not. One part has lost the ability to produce information goods strapped to physical objects and charge as if they were just physical objects. This is the case not just with things like movies or music, but also with drugs and increasingly with sophisticated manufactured goods. You can now buy a pretty good knockoff iPad for a fraction of the price.
And yet there’s a tension here, as there is another kind of value production that is all about the leaky and indeterminate way in which social knowledge gets turned into products. One could frame this as an instability for a ruling class which does not know which of these is more important, or whether both tendencies can really occur at once. Or whether it is even a split between different kinds of ruling class: one still dependent on extracting surplus labor power and selling commodities; one dependent instead on asymmetries of information and commanding the processes of social creation themselves by controlling the infrastructure of the information vector.
Perhaps one could even open up the question of whether the tensions within the ruling class point toward the formation of a different kind of ruling class. One part of the ruling class really insists on the enclosure of information within strict private property forms, while another part does not. One part has lost the ability to produce information goods strapped to physical objects and charge as if they were just physical objects. This is the case not just with things like movies or music, but also with drugs and increasingly with sophisticated manufactured goods. You can now buy a pretty good knockoff iPad for a fraction of the price.
And yet there’s a tension here, as there is another kind of value production that is all about the leaky and indeterminate way in which social knowledge gets turned into products. One could frame this as an instability for a ruling class which does not know which of these is more important, or whether both tendencies can really occur at once. Or whether it is even a split between different kinds of ruling class: one still dependent on extracting surplus labor power and selling commodities; one dependent instead on asymmetries of information and commanding the processes of social creation themselves by controlling the infrastructure of the information vector.
79
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 ‘object,’ as the instrument of its activities, as the means to its ends” (35). The property form makes the individualized subject the author and hence owner of something that is really much more likely the product of a machinic assemblage of different bits of various people’s subjectivity, various machines, assorted technical resources. Hence we end up with the myth that Steve Jobs created the iPhone—and reaped most of the rewards from it.
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 ‘object,’ as the instrument of its activities, as the means to its ends” (35). The property form makes the individualized subject the author and hence owner of something that is really much more likely the product of a machinic assemblage of different bits of various people’s subjectivity, various machines, assorted technical resources. Hence we end up with the myth that Steve Jobs created the iPhone—and reaped most of the rewards from it.
80
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 commons, here it appropriates the social commons, or rather a social-machinic one.6 Meanwhile, the dividual agents have to be patched back together as more-or-less whole subjects meant to think of themselves existentially as free agents who are both investors and debtors, trading in the self as currency in a market for souls.
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 commons, here it appropriates the social commons, or rather a social-machinic one.6 Meanwhile, the dividual agents have to be patched back together as more-or-less whole subjects meant to think of themselves existentially as free agents who are both investors and debtors, trading in the self as currency in a market for souls.
88
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 really organized more through the asignifying aspects of such procedures. Or take the call center, where the latest systems do not even require that the worker actually speak. She or he can just click on prerecorded phrases to step the caller through the sales routine.21 The software of course includes rating, ranking, classifying and timing functions.
In a useful insight, Lazzarato claims that what is managed now is not really labor so much as processes, of which labor is just a component. Management is not really about “human resources,” just resources for machinic enslavement, cordoned off in subroutines that are controlled and which have no reciprocal capacity to effect control. Lazzarato:
Sociology and industrial psychology seem to be incapable of grasping conceptually the qualitative leap that has occurred in the move from “work” to “process,” from subjection to enslavement. Those high on the hierarchy no longer deal with work but with “process” which integrates labor as “one” of its parts. (119)
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 really organized more through the asignifying aspects of such procedures. Or take the call center, where the latest systems do not even require that the worker actually speak. She or he can just click on prerecorded phrases to step the caller through the sales routine.21 The software of course includes rating, ranking, classifying and timing functions.
In a useful insight, Lazzarato claims that what is managed now is not really labor so much as processes, of which labor is just a component. Management is not really about “human resources,” just resources for machinic enslavement, cordoned off in subroutines that are controlled and which have no reciprocal capacity to effect control. Lazzarato:
Sociology and industrial psychology seem to be incapable of grasping conceptually the qualitative leap that has occurred in the move from “work” to “process,” from subjection to enslavement. Those high on the hierarchy no longer deal with work but with “process” which integrates labor as “one” of its parts. (119)
108
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 occupations. The line that was incorporated was the artistic critique, which spoke not of labor but of alienation. It turns out that extracting value out of labor could function just fine without rigid, externally imposed discipline and uniformity. McRobbie: “While the prevailing value system celebrates the growth of the creative economy and the rise of talent, the talented themselves are working long hours under the shadow of unemployment in a domain of intensive under-employment, and self-activated work” (153). McRobbie works this observation through a study of the work of Richard Florida, Richard Sennett and the Italian workerist school and its descendants, such as Virno, Berardi and Lazzarato.
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 occupations. The line that was incorporated was the artistic critique, which spoke not of labor but of alienation. It turns out that extracting value out of labor could function just fine without rigid, externally imposed discipline and uniformity. McRobbie: “While the prevailing value system celebrates the growth of the creative economy and the rise of talent, the talented themselves are working long hours under the shadow of unemployment in a domain of intensive under-employment, and self-activated work” (153). McRobbie works this observation through a study of the work of Richard Florida, Richard Sennett and the Italian workerist school and its descendants, such as Virno, Berardi and Lazzarato.