Extracted from: http://libcom.org/library/general-intellect-common-sense Date: 08-March-2014

General Intellect Towards an Inquiry into Immaterial Labour

Maurizio Lazzarato

Translation: Ed Emery

There has by now been a significant quantity of empirical research into the new forms

of organization of labour, and a corresponding wealth of theoretical reflection on the

question, and all this has begun to highlight a new concept of labour and the new

relations of power which this implies.

A first synthesis of these results, conducted from a particular viewpoint (that

relating to a definition of the technical and subjective-political composition of the

working class), can be expressed via the concept of immaterial labour, wherein

immaterial labour is the labour which produces the informational and cultural content

of the commodity. This concept refers to two different methodologies of labour: on the

one hand, as regards the "informational content" of the commodity, it alludes directly

to the modifications of working-class labour in the big industrial concerns and big

organizations in the tertiary sector where the jobs of immediate labour are increasingly

subordinated to the capacities of treatment of information (and of horizontal and vertical

communication). On the other hand, as regards the activity which produces the "cultural

content" of the commodity, it alludes to a series of activities which, normally speaking,

are not codified as labour, in other words to all the activities which tend to define and

fix cultural and artistic norms, fashions, tastes, consumer standards and, more

strategically, public opinion. Once the privileged domain of the bourgeoisie and its

children, these activities are today a spreading,* after the end of the 1970s, of what has

been defined as "mass intellectuality". The profound modifications in the strategic

sectors have changed radically not only the composition, the management and the

regulation of the workforce, the norms of production, but more deeply still the role and

function of intellectuals and of their activity within society.

The "great transformation", which began at the start of the 1970s, have altered

the very terms of the question. Manual labour incorporates increasing numbers of

"intellectual" procedures, and the new technologies of communication involve

increasingly subjectivities that are rich in knowledge. Not only has intellectual labour

has not only been subjected to the norms of capitalist production, but a new "mass

intellectuality" has been constituted between the demands of production and the forms

of "self-valorization" that the struggle against work has produced. The opposition

between manual labour and intellectual labour, or between material labour and

immaterial labour, risks failing to grasp the new nature of the productive activity which

integrates and transforms this separation. The division between conception and

execution, between labour and creation, between author and public, is at the same time

overcome within the "labour process" and re imposed as political command within the

"process of valorization".

The Restructured Worker

Twenty years of restructuring of the big factories has led to a strange paradox. In effect,

what has been set up is the variants of the post-Fordist model both on the defeat of the

Fordist worker and on the recognition of the centrality of living labour, ever

increasingly intellectualized within production. In the big restructured undertaking, the

work of the worker is a work which increasingly implies, at various levels, the ability to

choose between different alternatives, and thus a responsibility in regard to given

decisions taken. The concept of "interface", used by sociologists in the field of

communications, gives full account of this activity of the worker. Interface between

different functions, between different work-teams, between levels of the hierarchy, etc...

As the new management prescribes, today it is "the soul of the worker which must come

down into the factory". It's his personality, his subjectivity which must be organised and

commanded. Quality and quantity of labour are organized around its immateriality. This

transformation of working class labour into labour of control, of management of

information, into a decision-making capacity which requires the investment of

subjectivity, touches workers in varying ways, according to their function within the

factory hierarchy, but is nonetheless present as an irreversible process. Work can, thus,

be defined as the ability to activate and manage productive cooperation. The workers

must become "active subjects" in the coordination of the different functions of

production, instead of being subjected to it as simple command. Collective learning

becomes the heart of productivity, because it is not a matter of composing differently, or

organizing competences which are already codified, but of looking for new ones.

However, the problem of subjectivity and of its collective form, of its constitution

and its development, has immediately become a problem of a clash between social classes

within the organization of labour.

We would stress that we are not describing a Utopian place of recomposition, but

the terrain and the very conditions of the clash between social classes.

The capitalist must command subjectivity as such, without any mediation; the

prescription of tasks has been transformed into a prescription for subjectivities,

according to a felicitous definition of the team of researchers who have analyzed "the

caprices of the flow".* "You are subjects" is thus the new command which rings out

within Western societies. Participative management is a technology of power, a

technology of constitution and of control of the "relationship of subjectivation". If

subjectivity cannot be limited to tasks of execution, it is necessary for its competences

of management, communication and creativity to be compatible with the conditions of

"production for production". "You are subjects" is thus a slogan which, far from

cancelling the antagonism between hierarchy and cooperation, between autonomy and

command, reposes it at a higher level, because it mobilizes and confronts itself with the

individual personality itself, of the worker. First and foremost we are dealing with an

authoritarian discourse: one must express oneself, one must speak, one must

communicate, one must cooperate. The "tone" is exactly the same as that of those who

were in executive command within Taylorist organization; what has changed is the

content. Second, if it is no longer possible to individualize rigidly tasks and competences

(labour as it is imposed by the scientific organization of labour), but if, on the contrary,

it is necessary to open them to cooperation and collective coordination, the "subjects

must be subjects of communication", active participants within a work team. The

relationship of communication (both vertical and horizontal) is thus completely

predetermined within content and also in form; it is subordinated to the "circulation of

information" and can only be one of its aspects. The subject is a simple relay of

codification and decodification, whose transmitted message must be "clear and without

ambiguity", within a context of communication that has been completely normalized by

the firm.* The necessity of commanding, and the violence which is co-natural to it, here

take on a normative communicative form.

The management watchword "you are to be subjects of communication" risks

becoming even more totalitarian than the rigid division between conception and

execution, because the capitalist would seek to involve the very subjectivity and will of

the worker within the production of value. He would want command to arise from the

subject himself, and from the communicative process: the worker self-controls himself

and self-responsibilises himself within his team without an intervention by the foreman,

whose role would be redefined as a role of an animator.* In reality, entrepreneurs are

tired of the puzzle presented by the necessity to recognize autonomy and freedom of

labour as only possible forms of productive cooperation and the necessity (a life and

death necessity for the capitalist) of not "redistributing" the power which the new

quality of labour and its organization imply. The new management only takes into

consideration the subjectivity of the worker with a view to codifying it according to the

modalities and finalities of production. What this phase of transformation still succeeds

in hiding is that the individual and collective interests of the workers and those of the

company are not one and the same.

If we define working-class work as an abstract activity which relates back to*

subjectivity, we do however need to avoid any misunderstanding. This form of

productive activity does not belong only to the more qualified workers; it is more a

matter of a use value of labour-power today, and more generally, of the form of the

activity of each productive subject within post-industrial society. One could say that

within the qualified worker, the "communicational model" is already determined,

constituted, and that its potentialities are already defined; whereas within the young

worker, the "precarious" worker, the unemployed youth, we are dealing with a pure

virtuality, fo a capacity which is still indeterminate but which shares already all the

characteristics of post-industrial productive subjectivity. The virtuality of this capacity

is neither empty nor ahistoric; it is, rather, a matter of an opening and of a potentiality

which have as their presupposition and historical origins the "struggle against work" of

the Fordist worker, and, closer to us, the process of socialisation, formation and cultural

self-valorisation.

This transformation of labour appears even more evident when one studies the social

cycle of production (the "diffuse factory", organisation of decentred labour on the one

hand and the various forms of tertiarisation on the other). Here one can measure the

extent to which the cycle of immaterial labour has taken on a strategic role within the

global organisation of production. the activities of research, conceptualisation,

management of human resources, together with all the tertiary activities, are organised

within computerised and telematic networks, which can only explain the cycle of

production and of the organisation of labour. The integration of scientific and industrial

and tertiary labour becomes one of the principal sources of productivity and passes

through the cycles of production examined previously which organise it.*

"Immaterial Labour" Properly Defined

All the characteristics of the post-industrial economy (present both in industry and at a

territorial level) are heightened within the form of "immaterial" production properly

defined: audiovisual production, advertising, fashion, the production of software,

photography, cultural activities etc.

The activities of this kind of immaterial labour oblige us to question the classic

definitions of "work" and of "workforce", because they are the result of a synthesis of

varying types of savoir-faire (those of intellectual activities, as regards the cultural-

informational content, those of manual activities for the ability to put together

creativity, imagination and technical and manual labour; and that of entrepreneurial

activities for that capacity of management of their social relations and of structuration

of the social cooperation of which they are a part). This immaterial labour constitutes

itself in forms that are immediately collective, and, so to speak, exists only in the form

of network and flow. The organization of its cycle of production (because this is precisely

what we are dealing with, once we abandon our factoryist prejudgments) is not

immediately visible because it is not confined by the walls of a factory. The location

within which it is exercised is immediately at the territorial level: the basin of immaterial

labour. Small and very small "productive units" (being often only one individual) are

organized for ad hoc projects and are used for the given time of work. The cycle of

production emerges only when it is solicited* by the capitalist, then to dissolve, once

"order" has been determined, within networks and flows which permit the reproduction

and enrichment of its productive capacities. Precariousness, hyperexploitation, mobility

and hierarchy are what characterize metropolitan immaterial labour. Behind the label of

the "independent or dependent" worker is hidden a true and proper intellectual

proletarian, recognized as such only by the employers who exploit them.

What is worth noting, within these activities, is that it is increasingly difficult to

distinguish free time from labour time. We find ourselves in front of a global lifetime

which, in a certain sense, coincides with work.

This form of work is, at the same time, characterized by real entrepreneurial

competences, which consist:

a) in a sort of ability of management of its social relations;

b) in the stimulation of social cooperation within the basin of immaterial labour

and within its structuration.

Thus the quality of this kind of workforce doesn't reside solely in its professional

capacities (which enable the construction of the cultural-informational content of the

commodity), but also of its competences of "management" of its own activity and as

coordinator of a different immaterial labour (production and management of the cycle).

This immaterial labour appears as a true mutation of "living labour".

Here the distancing from the Taylorist model is at its maximum.

Immaterial labour finds itself at the crossroads (is the interface) of a new

relationship between production and consumption. The activation, both of productive

cooperation and of the social relationship with the consumer, is materialised within and

by the process of communication. It is immaterial labour which continually innovates

the form and the conditions of communication (and thus of work and of consumption).

It gives form and materializes needs, images, the tastes of consumers and these products

become in their turn powerful producers of needs, of images and of tastes. The

particularity of the commodity produced through immaterial labour (seeing that its

essential use-value is given by its value contained, informational and cultural)* consists

in the fact that this is not destroyed in the act of consumption, but enlarges, transforms,

creates the "ideological" and cultural environment of the consumer. This does not

produce the physical capacity of the workforce, it transforms the person who uses it.

Immaterial labour produces first of all a "social relationship" (a relationship of

innovation, of production, of consumption); and only if it succeeds in this production

does its activity have an economic value. This activity shows immediately that which

material production "hid": in other words, labour produces not only commodities, but

first and foremost the capital relationship.

The Autonomy of the Productive Synergies within Immaterial Labour

Our working hypothesis consists in the observation that the cycle of immaterial labour

is preconstituted on the basis of a social workforce which is autonomous, and able to

organize its own work as its own relations with the enterprise. Industry does not form

this new workforce, but simply recuperates it and adapts it. The control of industry, on

this new workforce, is predisposed by an independent organization and by a free

"entrepreneurial activity" of its productive force. Proceeding on this terrain, we enter

into the debate on the nature of work in the post-Fordist phase of the organization of

labour. Among economists, the predominant view of this problematic can be related back

to a statement: immaterial labour reveals itself within the forms of organization which

industrial centralization allows to it. On this terrain, and on the same basis, two schools

differ: one is the extension of the neoclassical analysis; the other is that of systems

theory.

In the first, the attempt to solve the problem consists in a redefinition of the

problematic of the market. They ask whether, in order to explain the phenomena of

communication and the new dimensions of organization, there should not be introduced,

not only cooperation and intensity of labour, but other analytical variables

(anthropological? immaterial?) and whether on this basis there should not be other

objectives of optimization introduced, etc.

In reality, the neo-classical model finds great difficulties in freeing itself from the

constrictions of coherence imposed by the theory of general equilibrium. The new

phenomenologies of labour, the new dimensions of organization, of communication, the

power (potenza) of spontaneous synergies, the autonomy of subjects, the independence

of the networks, were neither foreseen nor foreseeable by a general theory which

considered material labour and the industrial economy as indispensable. Today, with the

new data available, the micro-economy revolts against the macro-economy, and the

classical model is corroded by a new irreducible anthropology.

Systems theory, eliminating the constriction of the market and giving the central

place to organization, is more open to the new phenomenology of labour, and in

particular to the emergence of immaterial labour. In the more highly developed systemic

theories, organization is conceived as the ensemble of material and immaterial

dispositives,* both individual and collective, which can permit a given group to reach

objectives. In order to assure the success of this organizational process, there are

foreseen instruments of regulation, either voluntary or automatic. A consideration from

the viewpoint of social synergies becomes possible, immaterial labour can be taken on

board, in consideration of its global efficacy. Nonetheless these points of view remain

tied to an image of the organization of work and of its social territory, within which the

efficacious activity from the economic point of view (that is to say, the activity

conforming to the objective) cannot not be considered as a surplus in relation to a

collective cognitive dispositive. Sociology, as economy of labour, systemic, cannot

detach themselves from this presupposition.

We think that the analysis of immaterial labour and the description of its

organization can lead us beyond the presuppositions of enterprise theory which itself

developed under the form of the neoclassical school or under the school of systems

theory; we think, meanwhile, that it can lead us to define, at a territorial level, a location

of radical autonomy of productive synergies of immaterial labour. Against the old

schools, the viewpoint of a constitutive "anthropo-sociology" can thus be decisively

established.

With the predominance of this latter within social production, we find ourselves

facing an interruption within the continuity of productive models. With this we mean

that, unlike what is thought by many theoreticians of post-Fordism, we do not believe

that this new workforce is solely functional to a new historical phase of capitalism and

of its process of accumulation and reproduction; this workforce is thus the product of a

"silent revolution" which is taking place within the anthropology of work and within

the reconfiguration of its senses and its significance. Waged labour and direct

subjugation (to organization) are no longer the principal form of the contractual

relationship between capitalist and worker; polymorphous autonomous work emerges

as the dominant form, a kind of "intellectual worker" (operaio intellettuale) who is himself

an entrepreneur, inserted within a market that is mobile and within networks that are

changeable in time and space.

The Inquiry: From the Concept of General Intellect to a Project of

Research/Organization

If the "discovery" of the Marxian concept of "General Intellect" guaranteed a sure

theoretical and political anticipation, today this anticipation has become a reality of

management and of organization of the collective capitalist. During the 1980s, at a

worldwide level, production and command were rearticulated along the lines of the

networks and flows of immaterial labour. Its cooperation and its subjectivity guaranteed

management, innovation, productivity of the post-Taylorist system. The class

anticipation sprang out* against the massive and imposing "setting-to-work" of general

intellect. In these conditions, also a theoretical advance, requires as an absolutely

necessary presupposition an inquiry into the powerful economic, productive and political

threads* woven around immaterial labour. An inquiry into the material power (potenza)

of the immaterial will only be able to bring forth convincing results if it takes on the

necessity of the political constitution of the "general intellect" as a precondition.