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No kind of knowledge production, whether of science or culture or even philosophy, is exogenous to the commodity form any more. But neither is it as simple as saying that “invention becomes a business” (61). Rather, it became a new kind of business, which changed all the others. There is no eternal capital. It has no transhistorical essence. It mutates in both its particulars and its abstract forms. It can neither be negated from without, nor does merely accelerating it do anything other than open metabolic rifts. There can be no Promethean leap.
Borrowing from the energetic worldview, capital becomes an entropic system:
Capitalism is like a poorly designed steam engine that must be run at top speed, despite the fact that this speed contributes to a greater overall loss of heat. This increased overall heat can be neither transformed into productive work nor released in adequate quantities. Instead it threatens to blow up the engine itself. (91)
quoting amy wendling, karl marx on technology and alienation
The “Fragment” distinguishes fixed and circulating capital, where fixed capital is embodied in a particular use value (machines) and circulating capital realizes its value in exchange (money). Like natural resources such as water and air, the general level of technology is something capital gets “free of charge” from the commons. But capital has interests in fettering tech and science, which can undermine as well as augment a given regime of accumulation.
Fixed capital replaces labor, raising productivity and profits, but capital is chasing its own tail, and as fixed capital grows, the rate of profit (supposedly) falls. Workers become obsolete. Pushing up profits is a matter of intensifying work or lengthening the working day. Capital’s problem—as Georges Bataille well knew—is not scarcity but abundance, or rather the attempt to maintain scarcity within abundance.17 Against this, Marx sketches only the faintest outline of communism as noninstrumentalist use value, a theme picked up in different ways by Bataille, Marcuse and Haraway, where use value becomes the gift or pleasure or situations.18
Karatani sees the stages of the world market system in terms of the key world commodity of each. Thus for mercantilism it is textiles, for liberalism it is light industry, for finance capitalism it is heavy industry, for state monopoly capitalism it is durable consumer goods, and for multinational capitalism it is information. Brown would call this neoliberalism, but that’s too benign a term for such an imperialistic world system. The current stage, despite appearances, is one of the weakness of the old hegemon, the United States, within the world system. It is an era of the expanded export of capital and corresponding cuts to redistributive justice by the states at the core of the old world system, as “state-capital was freed from egalitarian demands” (279).
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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)
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.
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.