Conferência - Researching Social Software

Ciclo de Conferências “Tecnologia e configurações do humano”

Researching Social Software

http://socialsoftware-portugal.blogspot.com/


5ª Feira, 29 de Novembro de 2007 - 16h-18h
Sala de Seminários do ICS – r/c
Instituto de Ciências Sociais
Campus de Gualtar Braga, Portugal

Conferencistas

Adrian Mackenzie (Universidade de Lancaster)
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/staff/mackenza

Eduardo Jorge Esperança – Dep. Sociologia, Univ. de Évora
Miguel Ferreira – Dep. Sistemas de Informação, Escola de Engenharia, Universidade do Minho
Zara Pinto-Coelho e José Pinheiro Neves – Centro de Estudos Comunicação e Sociedade (CECS), Univ. do Minho

Moderador: Nelson Zagalo (CECS – Univ. do Minho)

Organização:

Universidade do Minho

Centro de Estudos de Comunicação e Sociedade

Centro de Investigação em Ciências Sociais

PhD Workshop: Researching Social Software

PhD Workshop

Researching Social Software

28-30 November 2007

Location: Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Universidade do Minho, Campus de Gualtar, Braga, Portugal

Course Leader: Adrian Mackenzie, University of Lancaster

Professor Adrian Mackenzie is Professor at the Institute for Cultural Research, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Lancaster.

His research interests include anthropology of post-representational thinking and cognition; theories of capacity, individuation, invention and differentiation; wirelessness: cultural politics of infrastructure, embodiments of connectivity and network images; repetition and difference in video and audiovisual technology; new media/technological cultures and practices. See: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/staff/mackenza


His last books are:
• Cutting Code: Software and Sociality, Digital Formations Series, Peter Lang, NY, 2006

• Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed, Continuum Press, 2002; reprinted

Description and objective

This PhD-course aims to examine and discuss different versions and definitions of social software and how experiences of relation to others can be understood in social software. It also aims to situate software in terms of processes of production, consumption and exchange, and to discuss different approaches, techniques and difficulties involved in researching software.

Structure of the course
Each session would be 2.5 to 3 hours. Each session would have one or two readings to be done in advance. There are also websites and internet examples that should be consulted in advance. Student presentations would be part of each session.

Background reading for the workshop:
Maurizio Lazzarato (1996) 'Immaterial Labour', in Paolo Virno & Michael Hardt (eds.) Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Programme

Session 1: What is social software?
Exploration of different versions and definitions of social software. This would best be done by working with same major examples including ebay, facebook, myspace, flickr, and youtube. The session would centre on close analysis of the visual and material cultures of examples. The reading for this session comes from a well known internet commentator, and publisher, Tim O’Reilly.

Session 2: Living with social software: self-other relations and sociality
Key example: Facebook or Second Life
Main focus of this session will be on how experiences of sociality, of belonging, of relation to others can be understood in social software. The readings analyse this from very different angles. The first is informed by Marxist thought, the second by social studies of technology.

Session 3: Social software in technological economies
Key example: Google
This session will situate software in terms of processes of production, consumption and exchange. The readings offer very different perspectives on this. Barry and Slater’s article comes from sociologies of science and technology. Benkler’s work comes from liberal political thought.

Session 4: Researching social software
Session on different approaches, techniques and difficulties in researching software.

Registration and contact:

The application deadline is 20th November 2007.
Please send by email a short description (no more than one page) of your PhD project, specifying your name, email address, affiliation, supervisor, your particular interest in the seminar and why you would benefit from attending it, to the organization committee (social.software.portugal@gmail.com). Number of participants: max. 15.
A fee will be charged for participation to cover administrative costs, tea/coffee and lunches and one dinner during the seminar. .The fee is 60 euros, payable on the first day of the seminar in cash (an official receipt will be given). Travel and accommodation are the responsibility of the participant.

For more information, contact:

José Pinheiro Neves (social.software.portugal@gmail.com)

Zara Pinto-Coelho (social.software.portugal@gmail.com)


See also:

http://socialsoftware-portugal.blogspot.com/

http://neves.do.sapo.pt/mackenzie/PhDSeminarMackenzie25Set07.pdf

Organization:

Centro de Estudos de Comunicação e Sociedade
Centro de Investigação em Ciências Sociais
Universidade do Minho, Portugal

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Chamadas para candidatura

Workshop para Estudantes de Doutoramento: Investigando o Software Social.

28-30 Novembro 2007

Local: Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Campus de Gualtar, Braga

•Professor convidado: Adrian Mackenzie, Universidade de Lancaster(http://www.lancs.ac.uk/staff/mackenza)

Descrição e objectivo: Este workshop visa examinar e discutir diferentes versões e definições do software social, e o modo como as experiências derelacionamento com os outros podem ser compreendidas neste quadro. Também visa situar o software social em termos de produção, consumo e troca, e discutir diferentes abordagens e técnicas envolvidas na investigação sobre softwaresocial.

Estrutura: Cada sessão terá a duração de 2.5 a 3 horas. Pressupõe a leitura prévia de um ou mais artigos e a consulta de sítos na internet.

Fazem parte de cada sessão apresentações dos projectos de doutoramento dos participantes.

Sessão 1: “What is social software?” Exemplos: ebay, facebook, myspace, flickr, and youtube

Sessão 2: “Living with social software: self-other relations and sociality”. Exemplos: Facebook or Second Life

Sessão 3: “Social software in technological economies”

Session 4: “Researching social software

Candidaturas e contactos:

As candidaturas devem ser feitas até dia 20 de Novembro de 2007. Para o efeito, os interessados deverão enviar electronicamente uma descrição sucinta (nãomais de uma página e meia) do projecto de doutoramento, especificando o seunome, endereço electrónico, filiação institucional, nome do orientador, ointeresse neste seminário e os benefícios que o mesmo lhe trará, para acomissão organizadora (social.software.portugal@gmail.com).

Aceitaremos 15 participantes.

O custo da inscrição, que cobre custos administrativos, chá/café, almoços e umjantar, é de 60 euros, a entregar no primeiro dia do Workshop (será dado umrecibo oficial).

As viagens e a estadia são da responsabilidade dos participantes.

Para mais informação, contacte:

José Pinheiro Neves (social.software.portugal@gmail.com)

Zara Pinto-Coelho (social.software.portugal@gmail.com)

Para mais detalhes sobre o programa e exigências do curso, consulte:

http://socialsoftware-portugal.blogspot.com/

Background reading for the workshop: the concept of "Immaterial Labour"

Background reading for the workshop Social Software with Adrian Mackenzie


Maurizio Lazzarato (1996) 'Immaterial Labour', in Paolo Virno & Michael Hardt (eds.) Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Ver aqui:
http://www.generation-online.org/c/fcimmateriallabour3.htm

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Immaterial Labour

by Maurizio Lazzarato

"A significant amount of empirical research has been conducted concerning the new forms of the organization of work. This, combined with a corresponding wealth of theoretical reflection, has made possible the identification of a new conception of what work is nowadays and what new power relations it implies.

An initial synthesis of these results—framed in terms of an attempt to define the technical and subjective-political composition of the working class—can be expressed in the concept of immaterial labor, which is defined as the labor that produces the informational and cultural concent of the commodity. The concept of immaterial labor refers to two different aspects of labor. On the one hand, as regards the "informational content" of the commodity, it refers directly to the changes taking place in workers' labor processes in big companies in the industrial and tertiary sectors, where the skills involved in direct labor arc increasingly skills involving cybernetics and computer control (and horizontal and vertical communi­cation). On che other hand, as regards the activity that produces the "cultural content" of the commodity, immaterial labor involves a series of activities that arc not normally recognized as "work"—in other words, the kinds of activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and, more strategically, public opinion. Once the privileged domain of the bour­geoisie and its children, these activities have since the end of the 1970s become thedomain of what we have come to define as "mass intellectuality." The profound changes in these strategic sectors have radically modified not only the composition, management, and regulation of the workforce—the organization of production—but also, and more deeply, the role and function of intellectuals and their activities within society.

The "great transformation" that began at the start of the 1970s has changed the very terms in which the question is posed. Manual labor is increasingly coming to involve procedures that could be defined as "intellectual," and the new communications technologies increasingly require subjectivities that are rich in knowledge. It is not simply that intellectual labor has become subjected to the norms of capitalist production. What has happened is that a new "mass intellectuality" has come into being, created out of a combination of the demands of capitalist production and the forms of "self-valorization" that the struggle against work has produced. The old dichotomy between "mental and manual labor," or between "material labor and immaterial labor," risks failing to grasp the new nature of productive activity, which takes this separation on board and transforms it. The split between conception and execution, between labor and creativity, between author and audience, is simultaneously transcended within the "labor process" and reimposed as political command within the "process of valorization."

The Restructured Worker

Twenty years of restructuring of the big factories has led to a curious paradox. The various different post-Fordist models have been constructed both on the defeat of the Fordist worker and on the recognition of the centrality of (an ever increasingly intellectualized) living labor within production. In today's large restructured company, a worker's work increasingly involves, at various levels, an ability to choose among different alternatives and thus a degree of responsibility regarding decision making. The concept of "interface" used by communications sociologists provides a fair definition of the activities of this kind of worker—as an interface between different functions, between different work teams, between different levels of the hierarchy, and so forth. What modern management techniques are looking for is for "the worker's soul to become part of the factory." The worker's personality and subjectivity have to be made susceptible to organization and command. It is around immateriality that the quality and quantity of labor are organized. This transformation of working-class labor into a labor of control, of handling information, into a decision-making capacity that involves the investment of subjectivity, affects workers in varying ways according to their positions within the factory hierarchy, but it is nevertheless present as an irreversible process. Work can thus be defined as the capacity to activate and manage productive cooperation. In this phase, workers are expected to become "active subjects" in the coordination of the various functions of production, instead of being subjected to it as simple command. We arrive at a point where a collective learning process becomes the heart of productivity, because it is no longer a matter of finding different ways of composing or organizing already existing job functions, but of looking for new ones.

The problem, however, of subjectivity and its collective form, its constitution and its development, has immediately expressed itself as a clash between social classes within the organization of work. I should point out that what I am describing is not some Utopian vision of recomposition, but the very real terrain and conditions of the conflict between social classes. The capitalist needs to find an unmediated way of establishing command over subjectivity itself; the prescription and definition of tasks transforms into a prescription of subjectivities. The new slogan of Western societies is that we should all "become subjects." Participative management is a technology of power, a technology for creating and controlling the "subjective processes." As it is no longer possible to confine subjectivity merely to tasks of execution, it becomes necessary for the subject's competence in the areas of management, communication, and creativity to be made compatible with the conditions of "production for production's sake." Thus the slogan "become subjects," far from eliminating the antagonism between hierarchy and cooperation, between autonomy and command, actually re-poses the antagonism at a higher level, because it both mobilizes and clashes with the very personality of the individual worker. First and foremost, we have here a discourse that is authoritarian: one has to express oneself, one has to speak, communicate, cooperate, and so forth. The "tone" is that of the people who were in executive command under Taylorization; all that has changed is the content. Second, if it is no longer possible to lay down and specify jobs and responsibilities rigidly (in the way that was once done with "scientific" studies of work), but if, on the contrary, jobs now require cooperation and collective coordination, then the subjects of that production must be capable of communication—they must be active participants within a work team. The communicational relationship (both vertically and horizontally) is thus completely predetermined in both form and content; it is subordinated to the "circulation of information" and is not expected to be anything other. The subject becomes a simple relayer of codification and decodification, whose transmitted messages must be "clear and free of ambiguity," within a communications context that has been completely normalized by management. Thenecessity of imposing command and the violence that goes along with it here take on a normative communicative form.

The management mandate to "become subjects of communication" threatens to be even more totalitarian than the earlier rigid division between mental and manual labor (ideas and execution), because capitalism seeks to involve even the worker's personality and subjectivity within the production of value. Capital wants a situation where command resides within the subject him- or herself, and within the communicative process. The worker is to be responsible for his or her own control and motivation within the work group without a foreman needing to intervene, and the foreman's role is redefined into that of a facilitator. In fact, employers are extremely worried by the double problem this creates: on one hand, they are forced to recognize the autonomy and freedom of labor as the only possible form of cooperation in production, but on the other hand, at the same time, they are obliged (a life-and-death necessity for the capitalist) not to "redistribute" the power that the new quality of labor and its organization imply. Today's management thinking takes workers' subjectivity into consideration only in order to codify it in line with the requirements of production. And once again this phase of transformation succeeds in concealing the fact that the individual and collective interests of workers and those of the company are not identical.

I have defined working-class labor as an abstract activity that nowadays involves the application of subjectivity. In order to avoid misunderstandings, however, I should add that this form of productive activity is not limited only to highly skilled workers; it refers to a use value of labor power today, and, more generally, to the form of activity of every productive subject within postindustrial society. One could say that in the highly skilled, qualified worker, the "communicational model" is already given, already constituted, and that its potentialities are already defined. In the young worker, however, the "precarious" worker, and the unemployed youth, we are dealing with a pure virtuality, a capacity that is as yet undetermined but that already shares all the characteristics of postindustrial productive subjectivity. The virtuality of this capacity is neither empty nor ahistoric; it is, rather, an opening and a potentiality that have as their historical origins and antecedents the "struggle against work" of the Fordist worker and, in more recent times, the processes of socialization, educational formation, and cultural self-valorization.

This transformation of the world of work appears even more evident when one studies the social cycle of production: the "diffuse factory" and decentralization of production on the one hand and the various forms of tertiarizarion on the other. Here one can measure the extent to which the cycle of immaterial labor has come to assume a strategic role within the global organization of production. The various activities of research, conceptualization, management of human resources, and so forth, together with all the various tertiary activities, are organized within computerized and multimedia networks. These are the terms in which we have to understand the cycle of production and the organization of labor. The integration of scientific labor into industrial and tertiary labor has become one of the principal sources of productivity, and it is becoming a growing factor in the cycles of production that organize it.

"Immaterial Labor" in the Classic Definition

All the characteristics of the postindustrial economy (both in industry and society as a whole) are highly present within the classic forms of "immaterial" production: audiovisual production, advertising, fashion, the production of software, photography, cultural activities, and so forth. The activities of this kind of immaterial labor force us to question the classic definitions of work and workforce, because they combine the results of various different types of work skill: intellectual skills, as regards the cultural-informational content; manual skills for the ability to combine creativity, imagination, and technical and manual labor; and entrepreneurial skills in the management of social relations and the structuring of that social cooperation of which they are a part. This immaterial labor constitutes itself in forms that are immediately collective, and we might say that it exists only in the form of networks and flows. The organization of the cycle of production of immaterial labor (because this is exactly what it is, once we abandon our factoryist prejudices—a cycle of production) is not obviously apparent to the eye, because it is not defined by the four walls of a factory. The location in which it operates is outside in the society at large, at a territorial level that we could call "the basin of immaterial labor." Small and sometimes very small "productive units" (often consisting of only one individual) are organized for specific ad hoc projects, and may exist only for the duration of those particular jobs. The cycle of production comes into operation only when it is required by the capitalist; once the job has been done, the cycle dissolves back into the networks and flows that make possible the reproduction and enrichment of its productive capacities. Precariousness, hyperexploitation, mobility, and hierarchy are the most obvious characteristics of metropolitan immaterial labor. Behind the label of the independent "self-employed" worker, what we actually find is an intellectual proletarian, but who is recognized as such only by the employers who exploit him or her. It is worth noting that in this kind of working existence it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish leisure time from work time. In a sense, life becomes inseparable from work.This labor form is also characterized by real managerial functions that consist in (1) a certain ability to manage its social relations and (2) the eliciting of social cooperation within the structures of the basin of immaterial labor.

The quality of this kind of labor power is thus defined not only by its professional capacities (which make possible the construction of the cultural-informational content of the commodity), but also by its ability to "manage" its own activity and act as the coordinator of the immaterial labor of others (production and management of the cycle). This immaterial labor appears as a real mutation of "living labor." Here we are quite far from the Taylorist model of organization.

Immaterial labor finds itself at the crossroads (or rather, it is the interface) of a new relationship between production and consumption. The activation of both productive cooperation and the social relationship with the consumer is materialized within and by the process of communication. The role of immaterial labor is to promote continual innovation in the forms and conditions of communication (and thus in work and consumption). It gives form to and materializes needs, the imaginary, consumer tastes, and so forth, and these products in turn become powerful producers of needs, images, and tastes. The particularity of the commodity produced through immaterial labor (its essential use value being given by its value as informational and cultural content) consists in the fact that it is not destroyed in the act of consumption, but rather it enlarges, transforms, and creates the "ideological" and cultural environment of the consumer. This commodity does not produce the physical capacity of labor power; instead, it transforms the person who uses it. Immaterial labor produces first and foremost a "social relationship" (a relationship of innovation, production, and consumption). Only if it succeeds in this production does its activity have an economic value. This activity makes immediately apparent something that material production had "hidden," namely, that labor produces not only commodities, but first and foremost it produces the capital relation.

The Autonomy of the Productive Synergies of Immaterial Labor

My working hypothesis, then, is that the cycle of immaterial labor takes as its starting point a social labor power that is independent and able to organize both its own work and its relations with business entities. Industry does not form or create this new labor power, but simply takes it on board and adapts it. Industry's control over this new labor power presupposes the independent organization and "free entrepreneurial activity" of the labor power. Advancing further on this terrain brings us into the debate on the nature of work in the post-Fordist phase of the organization of labor. Among economists, the predominant view of this problematic can be expressed in a single statement: immaterial labor operates within the forms of organization that the centralization of industry allows. Moving from this common basis, there are two differing schools of thought: one is the extension of neoclassical analysis; the other is that of systems theory.In the former, the attempt to solve the problem comes through a redefinition of the problematic of the market. It is suggested that in order to explain the phenomena of communication and the new dimensions of organization one should introduce not only cooperation and intensity of labor, but also other analytic variables (anthropological variables? immaterial variables?) and that on this basis one might introduce other objectives of optimization and so forth. In fact, the neoclassical model has considerable difficulty in freeing itself from the coherence constraints imposed by the theory of general equilibrium. The new phenomenologies of labor, the new dimensions of organization, communication, the potentiality of spontaneous synergies, the autonomy of the subjects involved, and the independence of the networks were neither foreseen nor foreseeable by a general theory that believed that material labor and an industrial economy were indispensable.

Today, with the new data available, we find the microeconomy in revolt against the macroeconomy, and the classical model is corroded by a new and irreducible anthropological reality.

Systems theory, by eliminating the constraint of the market and giving pride of place to organization, is more open to the new phenomenology of labor and in particular to the emergence of immaterial labor. In more developed systemic theories, organization is conceived as an ensemble of factors, both material and immaterial, both individual and collective, that can permit a given group to reach objectives. The success of this organizational process requires instruments of regulation, either voluntary or automatic. It becomes possible to look at things from the point of view of social synergies, and immaterial labor can be taken on board by virtue of its global efficacy. These viewpoints, however, are still tied to an image of the organization of work and its social territory within which effective activity from an economic viewpoint (in other words, the activity conforming to the objective) must inevitably be considered as a surplus in relation to collective cognitive mechanisms. Sociology and labor economics, being systemic disciplines, are both incapable of detaching themselves from this position.

I believe that an analysis of immaterial labor and a description of its organization can lead us beyond the presuppositions of business theory— whether in its neoclassical school or its systems theory school. It can lead us to define, at a territorial level, a space for a radical autonomy of the productive synergies of immaterial labor. We can thus move against the old schools of thought to establish, decisively, the viewpoint of an "anthropo-sociology" that is constitutive.

Once this viewpoint comes to dominate within social produc­tion, we find that we have an interruption in the continuity of models of produc­tion. By this I mean that, unlike the position held by many theoreticians of post-Fordism, I do not believe that this new labor power is merely functional to a new historical phase of capitalism and its processes of accumulation and reproduction. This labor power is the product of a "silent revolution" taking place within the anthropological realities of work and within the reconfiguration of its meanings. Waged labor and direct subjugation (to organization) no longer constitute the prin­cipal form of the contractual relationship between capitalist and worker. A polymorphous self-employed autonomous work has emerged as the dominant form, a kind of "intellectual worker" who is him or herself an entrepreneur, inserted within a market that is constantly shifting and within networks that are changeable in time and space.

The Cycle of Immaterial Production

Up to this point I have been analyzing and constructing the concept of immaterial labor from a point of view that could be defined, so to speak, as "microeconomic." If now we consider immaterial labor within the globality of the production cycle, of which it is the strategic stage, we will be able to see a series of characteristics of post-Taylorist production that have not yet been taken into consideration.

I want to demonstrate in particular how the process of valorization tends to be identified with the process of the production of social communication and how the two stages (valorization and communication) immediately have a social and territorial dimension. The concept of immaterial labor presupposes and results in an enlargement of productive cooperation that even includes the produc­tion and reproduction of communication and hence of its most important contents: subjectivity.

If Fordism integrated consumption into the cycle of the reproduction of capital, post-Fordism integrates communication into it. From a strictly eco­nomic point of view, the cycle of reproduction of immaterial labor dislocates the production-consumption relationship as it is defined as much by the "virtuous Keynesian circle" as by the Marxist reproduction schemes of the second volume of Capital. Now, rather than speaking of the toppling of "supply and demand," we should speak about a redefinition of the production-consumption relationship. As we saw earlier, the consumer is inscribed in the manufacturing of the product from its conception. The consumer is no longer limited to consuming commodities (destroying them in the act of consumption). On the contrary, his or her consumption should be productive in accordance to the necessary conditions and the new prod­ucts. Consumption is then first of all a consumption of information. Consumption is no longer only the "realization" of a product, but a real and proper social process that for the moment is defined with the term communication.

Large-Scale Industry and Services

To recognize the new characteristics of the production cycle of immaterial labor, we should compare it with the production of large-scale industry and services. If the cycle of immaterial production immediately demonstrates to us the secret of post-Taylorist production (that is to say, that social communication and the social relation­ship that constitutes it become productive), then it would be interesting to examine how these new social relationships innervate even industry and services, and how they oblige us to reformulate and reorganize even the classical forms of "production."

Large-Scale Industry

The postindustrial enterprise and economy are founded on the manipulation of information. Rather than ensuring (as nineteenth-century enter­prises did) the surveillance of the inner workings of the production process and the supervision of the markets of raw materials (labor included), business is focused on the terrain outside of the production process: sales and the relationship with the consumer. It always leans more toward commercialization and financing than toward production. Prior to being manufactured, a product must be sold, even in "heavy" industries such as automobile manufacturing; a car is put into production only after the sales network orders it. This strategy is based on the production and consump­tion of information. It mobilizes important communication and marketing strategies in order to gather information (recognizing the tendencies of the market) and circulate it (constructing a market). In the Taylorist and Fordist systems of production, by introducing the mass consumption of standardized commodities, Ford could still say that the consumer has the choice between one black model T5 and another black model T5. "Today the standard commodity is no longer the recipe to success, and the automobile industry itself, which used to be the champion of the great 'low price' series, would want to boast about having become a neoindustry of singularization"—and quality.1 For the majority of businesses, survival involves the permanent search for new commercial openings that lead to the identification of always more ample or differentiated product lines. Innovation is no longer sub­ordinated only to the rationalization of labor, but also to commercial imperatives. It seems, then, that the postindustrial commodity is the result of a creative process that involves both the producer and the consumer.

Services

If from industry proper we move on to the "services" sector (large banking services, insurance, and so forth), the characteristics of the process I have described appear even more clearly. We are witnessing today not really a growth of services, but rather a development of the "relations of service." The move beyond the Taylorist organization of services is characterized by the integration of the rela­tionship between production and consumption, where in fact the consumer inter­venes in an active way in the composition of the product. The product "service" becomes a social construction and a social process of "conception" and innovation. In service industries, the "back-office" tasks (the classic work of services) have dimin­ished and the tasks of the "front office" (the relationship with clients) have grown. There has been thus a shift of human resources toward the outer part of business. As recent sociological analyses tell us, the more a product handled by the service sector is characterized as an immaterial product, the more it distances itself from the model of industrial organization of the relationship between production and consumption. The change in this relationship between production and consump­tion has direct consequences for the organization of the Taylorist labor of produc­tion of services, because it draws into question both the contents of labor and the division of labor (and thus the relationship between conception and execution loses its unilateral character). If the product is defined through the intervention of the consumer, and is therefore in permanent evolution, it becomes always more diffi­cult to define the norms of the production of services and establish an "objective" measure of productivity.

Immaterial Labor

All of these characteristics of postindustrial economics (present both in large-scale industry and the tertiary sector) are accentuated in the form of properly "immaterial" production. Audiovisual production, advertising, fashion, soft­ware, the management of territory, and so forth are all defined by means of the par­ticular relationship between production and its market or consumers. Here we are at the furthest point from the Taylorist model. Immaterial labor continually cre­ates and modifies the forms and conditions of communication, which in turn acts as the interface that negotiates the relationship between production and consump­tion. As I noted earlier, immaterial labor produces first and foremost a social rela­tion—it produces not only commodities, but also the capital relation.

If production today is directly the production of a social rela­tion, then the "raw material" of immaterial labor is subjectivity and the "ideological" environment in which this subjectivity lives and reproduces. The production of subjectivity ceases to be only an instrument of social control (for the reproduc­tion of mercantile relationships) and becomes directly productive, because the goal of our postindustrial society is to construct the consumer/communicator—and to construct it as "active." Immaterial workers (those who work in advertising, fashion, marketing, television, cybernetics, and so forth) satisfy a demand by the consumer and at the same time establish that demand. The fact that immaterial labor produces subjectivity and economic value at the same time demonstrates how capitalist production has invaded our lives and has broken down all the oppositions among economy, power, and knowledge. The process of social communication (and its principal content, the production of subjectivity) becomes here directly productive because in a certain way it "produces" production. The process by which the "social" (and what is even more social, that is, language, communication, and so forth) becomes "economic" has not yet been sufficiently studied. In effect, on the one hand, we are familiar with an analysis of the production of subjectivity defined as the constitutive "process" specific to a "relation to the self with respect to the forms of production particular to knowledge and power (as in a certain vein of poststructuralist French philosophy), but this analysis never intersects sufficiently with the forms of capitalist valorization. On the other hand, in the 1980s a network of economists and sociologists (and before them the Italian postworkerist tradition) developed an extensive analysis of the "social form of production," but that analysis does not integrate sufficiently the production of subjectivity as the content of valorization. Now, the post-Taylorist mode of production is defined precisely by putting subjectivity to work both in the activation of productive cooperation and in the production of the "cultural" contents of commodities.

The Aesthetic Model

But how is the production process of social communication formed? How does the production of subjectivity take place within this process? How does the production of subjectivity become the production of the consumer/communicator and its capac ities to consume and communicate? What role does immaterial labor have in this process? As I have already said, my hypothesis is this: the process of the production of communication tends to become immediately the process of valorization. If in the past communication was organized fundamentally by means of language and the institutions of ideological and literary/artistic production, today, because it is invested with industrial production, communication is reproduced by means of specific technological schemes (knowledge, thought, image, sound, and language reproduction technologies) and by means of forms of organization and "management" that are bearers of a new mode of production.

It is more useful, in attempting to grasp the process of the for­mation of social communication and its subsumption within the "economic," to use, rather than the "material" model of production, the "aesthetic" model that involves author, reproduction, and reception. This model reveals aspects that traditional eco­nomic categories tend to obscure and that, as I will show, constitute the "specific differences" of the post-Taylorist means of production.2 The "aesthetic/ideological" model of production will be transformed into a small-scale sociological model with all the limits and difficulties that such a sociological transformation brings. The model of author, reproduction, and reception requires a double transformation: in the first place, the three stages of this creation process must be immediately characterized by their social form; in the second place, the three stages must be under­stood as the articulations of an actual productive cycle.3

The "author" must lose its individual dimension and be trans­formed into an industrially organized production process (with a division of labor, investments, orders, and so forth), "reproduction" becomes a mass reproduction organized according to the imperatives of profitability, and the audience ("reception") tends to become the consumer/communicator. In this process of socialization and subsumption within the economy of intellectual activity the "ideological" product tends to assume the form of a commodity. I should emphasize, however, that the subsumption of this process under capitalist logic and the transformation of its products into commodities does not abolish the specificity of aesthetic production, that is to say, the creative relationship between author and audience.

The Specific Differences of the Immaterial Labor Cycle

Allow me to underline briefly the specific differences of the "stages" that make up the production cycle of immaterial labor (immaterial labor itself, its "ideological/ commodity products," and the "public/consumer") in relation to the classical forms of the reproduction of "capital."

As far as immaterial labor being an "author" is concerned, it is necessary to emphasize the radical autonomy of its productive synergies. As we have seen, immaterial labor forces us to question the classical definitions of work and workforce, because it results from a synthesis of different types of know-how: intel­lectual skills, manual skills, and entrepreneurial skills. Immaterial labor constitutes itself in immediately collective forms that exist as networks and flows. The subjugation of this form of cooperation and the "use value" of these skills to capitalist logic does not take away the autonomy of the constitution and meaning of immate­rial labor. On the contrary, it opens up antagonisms and contradictions that, to use once again a Marxist formula, demand at least a "new form of exposition."

The "ideological product" becomes in every respect a com­modity. The term ideological does not characterize the product as a "reflection" of reality, as false or true consciousness of reality. Ideological products produce, on the contrary, new stratifications of reality; they are the intersection where human power, knowledge, and action meet. New modes of seeing and knowing demand new technologies, and new technologies demand new forms of seeing and knowing. These ideological products are completely internal to the processes of the for­mation of social communication; that is, they are at once the results and the pre­requisites of these processes. The ensemble of ideological products constitutes the human ideological environment. Ideological products are transformed into com­modities without ever losing their specificity; that is, they are always addressed to someone, they are "ideally signifying," and thus they pose the problem of "meaning."

The general public tends to become the model for the consumer (audience/client). The public (in the sense of the user—the reader, the music lis­tener, the television audience) whom the author addresses has as such a double pro­ductive function. In the first place, as the addressee of the ideological product, the public is a constitutive element of the production process. In the second place, the public is productive by means of the reception that gives the product "a place in life" (in other words, integrates it into social communication) and allows it to live and evolve. Reception is thus, from this point of view, a creative act and an integrative part of the product. The transformation of the product into a commodity cannot abolish this double process of "creativity"; it must rather assume it as it is, and attempt to control it and subordinate it to its own values.

What the transformation of the product into a commodity cannot remove, then, is the character of event, the open process of creation that is estab­lished between immaterial labor and the public and organized by communication. If the innovation in immaterial production is introduced by this open process of creation, the entrepreneur, in order to further consumption and its perpetual re­newal, will be constrained to draw from the "values" that the public/consumer pro­duces. These values presuppose the modes of being, modes of existing, and forms of life that support them. From these considerations there emerge two principal consequences. First, values are "put to work." The transformation of the ideological product into a commodity distorts or deflects the social imaginary that is produced in the forms of life, but at the same time, commodity production must recognize itself as powerless as far as its own production is concerned. The second conse­quence is that the forms of life (in their collective and cooperative forms) are now the source of innovation.

The analysis of the different "stages" of the cycle of immaterial labor permits me to advance the hypothesis that what is "productive" is the whole of the social relation (here represented by the author-work-audience relationship) according to modalities that directly bring into play the "meaning." The specificity of this type of production not only leaves its imprint on the "form" of the process of production by establishing a new relationship between production and consump­tion, but it also poses a problem of legitimacy for the capitalist appropriation of this process. This cooperation can in no case be predetermined by economics, because it deals with the very life of society. "Economics" can only appropriate the forms and products of this cooperation, normalizing and standardizing them. The creative and innovative elements are tightly linked to the values that only the forms of life produce. Creativity and productivity in postindustrial societies reside, on the one hand, in the dialectic between the forms of life and values they produce and, on the other, in the activities of subjects that constitute them. The legitimation that the (Schumpeterian) entrepreneur found in his or her capacity for innovation has lost its foundation. Because the capitalist entrepreneur does not produce the forms and contents of immaterial labor, he or she does not even produce innovation. For eco­nomics there remains only the possibility of managing and regulating the activity of immaterial labor and creating some devices for the control and creation of the public/consumer by means of the control of communication and information tech­nologies and their organizational processes.

Creation and Intellectual Labor

These brief considerations permit us to begin questioning the model of creation and diffusion specific to intellectual labor and to get beyond the concept of creativ­ity as an expression of "individuality" or as the patrimony of the "superior" classes. The works of Simmel and Bakhtin, conceived in a time when immaterial production had just begun to become "productive," present us with two completely different ways of posing the relationship between immaterial labor and society. The first, Simmel's, remain completely invested in the division between manual labor and intellectual labor and give us a theory of the creativity of intellectual labor. The second, Bakhtin's, in refusing to accept the capitalist division of labor as a given, elaborate a theory of social creativity. Simmel, in effect, explains the function of "fashion" by means of the phenomenon of imitation or distinction as regulated and commanded by class relationships. Thus the superior levels of the middle classes are the ones that create fashion, and the lower classes attempt to imitate them. Fashion here functions like a barrier that incessantly comes up because it is incessantly battered down. What is interesting for this discussion is that, according to this conception, the immaterial labor of creation is limited to a specific social group and is not diffused except through imitation. At a deeper level, this model accepts the division of labor founded on the opposition between manual and intellectual labor that has as its end the regulation and "mystification" of the social process of creation and innovation. If this model had some probability of corresponding to the dynamics of the market of immaterial labor at the moment of the birth of mass consumption (whose effects Simmel very intelligently anticipates), it could not be utilized to account for the relationship between immaterial labor and consumer-public in postindustrial society. Bakhtin, on the contrary, defines immaterial labor as the superseding of the division between "material labor and intellectual labor" and demonstrates how creativity is a social process. In fact, the work on "aesthetic production" of Bakhtin and the rest of the Leningrad circle has this same social focus.

This is the line of investigation that seems most promising for developing a theory of the social cycle of immaterial production.

Translated by Paul Colilli and Ed Emery

Notes

1. Yves Clot, "Renouveau de l'industrialisme et activite philosophique," Futur anterieur, no. 10 (1992);

2. Both the creative and the social elements of this production encourage me to venture the use of the "aesthetic model." It is interesting to see how one could arrive at this new concept of labor by starting eitherfrom artistic activity (following the situationists) or from the traditional activity of the factory (following Italian workerist theories), both relying on the very Marxist concept of "living labor."

3. Walter Benjamin has already analyzed how since the end of the nineteenth century both artistic production and reproduction, along with its perception, have assumed collective forms. I cannot pause here to consider his works, but they are certainly fundamental for any genealogy of immaterial labor and its forms of reproduction".

Bibliografia para o workshop - Entrevista com O' Reilly

People Inside & Web 2.0: An Interview with Tim O’Reilly

in: http://www.openbusiness.cc/2006/04/25/people-inside-web-20-an-interview-with-tim-o-reilly/

Tuesday, April 25th, 2006

OpenBusiness spoke with Tim O’Reilly about the evolution of the Web and its most current trends, which are commonly labeled as Web 2.0. In September 2005, Tim wrote a seminal piece that presented many of the aspects of Web 2.0 and now surrounds much of the buzz around a new generation of internet applications. In the interview, he re-emphasizes the most important points of this development, talks about the evolutionary relationship between open & free and shares his vision of bionic systems that combine human and computational intelligence.

OB: At OpenBusiness, we’re especially interested in the rise of open content and open services and how they deal with the concept of “free”. How do you define that relationship? When are open and free the same and in what ways are they different?

For the last couple of year, I’ve been preaching an idea that Clayton Christensen first wrote about and called the “Law of Conservation of Attractive Profits.” We talked about it in response to my talk, the Open Source Paradigm shift, in which I focused a lot on lessons from the IBM PC.

What I saw was that IBM – through genius or accident or both – introduced this new, open architecture for a personal computer: anyone could build one and that was open hardware. It was not Open Source as we know it today but it was pretty close. IBM said, “Everything has to be built with off-the-shelf parts from at least two suppliers, here is the specification, now go out, be fruitful and multiply.” The unintended consequence of that decision was that it took all the profits out of assembling computer systems, which had been the source of great profits in the past. IBM was a completely dominant company and now we have low-margin players like Dell. But we also ended up with high-margin players like Intel and Microsoft, neither of which IBM foresaw. They signed a deal with Microsoft to do the operating system, Intel got control of a key component and ended up with near-monopoly profits, all while IBM struggled for many years. They have come back now but they had destroyed the computer industry as they knew it, replaced it with a new one, and there was a period other where –at least from the point of view from IBM – all the profits were disappearing from the system.

So when I started seeing comments by Ballmer saying Open Source is an intellectual property destroyer and it’s taking all the profits out of the system, I thought this is just what had happened before. We’re seeing the commoditization of software where the value is going out of many classes of software that people used to pay for. But it’s being rediscovered and moving up the stack and it’s moving down the stack. That led me to the couple of new ideas that we now call Web 2.0: the Internet as a platform, information businesses using software as a service, harnessing collective intelligence – that’s moving up the stack. Down the stack is what I call “Data as the Intel Inside.” This stack model is repeating itself as this economic model is repeating itself, and so I think that each time you see something becoming free, something else is becoming expensive, which goes back to the Law of Conservation of Attractive Profits.

Software became free, content even became largely free but now Google and Yahoo are collecting enormous sums of money by directing attention to their free content using a platform that’s built on top of their free software. Similarly, we look at Napster and thought that all of music would be free and now Apple has a billion dollar business selling songs. We’re also just a the early stages where Skype is making telephone calls free and Asterisk and making telephone calls free –relatively speaking– and I believe that there will be new sources of revenue that will be overlaid on top of that market.

I also think that it’s really easy early in a market with distributive innovation to see everything becoming cheap or free or commoditized and not to see the areas where there are new sources of control and new sources of revenue.

OB: Especially in the context of Web 2.0 business models, there has been a lot of emphasis on the ad-based model, which now supports everything from Wi-Fi to your mail account. What other layers do you see on top of that and are there alternate models that emerge?

Oh, absolutely – it actually goes back to this idea of “Data as the Intel Inside”. We look at all these mapping applications for example, in which Navtech and TeleAtlas are licensing data to Google, Yahoo and MSN where those companies are monetizing it by advertising but the data suppliers are monetizing it by license. The economic ecosystem is often much more complex than what people realize because I don’t think that it’s just an ad-supported market.

Ads are one way of collecting money but they’re far from the only way and if you look at the complexity of the web ecosystem, there are all kinds of people who are participating. All of those free bloggers are actually paying their blogging service provider or their ISP for hosting, as an example of the different models that start to work together and build any complex ecosystem.

OB: As you mentioned before, much of Web 2.0 is about user-generated content and harnessing collective intelligence. What were some of the catalysts that drove the web in this direction recently and what has sparked these recent shifts?

I wouldn’t say that anything really sparked it. Instead, we talk of network effects, by which networks grow as a result of the value of the connections they make. The internet always had this characteristic that its value was driven by the number of nodes and all the emergence of user-generated content and harnessing collective intelligence is just an expression of that fundamental dynamic.

What really happened was that the original Web had all of these characteristics: it was from the edges, it was bottom-up, it was long-tail. But then we had this detour where traditional content companies and people who are imitating traditional content companies decided that it was all about publishing, “content is king” and that this would get all the eyeballs that would be monetized by advertising – that was the dot-com boom and bust. But when the dust cleared, you saw that some companies had managed to survive. Pets.com was gone but here was Yahoo, here was Google, here was eBay, here was Amazon. All these companies that survived and we asked ourselves back when we first coined the term Web 2.0, “What distinguishes them?” In one way or another, they had rediscovered the logic of what makes Internet applications work – they had understood network effects.

Overall, there are certainly defining moments. For Google, it was Overture coming up with the advertising model, which put together Google’s user demand engine with a financial model. There was also the insight that you don’t just study the contents of documents but what people do with them as evidenced by the links they make.
If you look at eBay, it’s pretty clear that they had leveraged network effects in a fairly fundamental way too. Pierre [Omidyar] has this idealistic vision of a system he’s building in which buyers and sellers learn to trust each other.

Amazon also is a great example I keep bringing up because their system didn’t have a built-in architecture of participation; but they still worked it! On every page, they invite their users to participate, to annotate their data and to add value. They effectively overlaid an architecture of participation on a system that doesn’t intrinsically have one. In many ways, I think they’re the best company to study because they worked it whereas the other companies mostly locked into a sweet spot.

So as far as turning points go, the real one came when Tim Burners Lee introduced the world-wide web and everything else has just been a voyage of discovery.

OB: Since those earliest days, the Web has been an open platform but over the years, especially more recently, there has been the emergence of companies like Google and Yahoo that have started to centralize more and more data, attention and now also user-generated content like photos and videos. Is there are an increasing trend towards more centralization on the Web today?

Yes and No. On the one hand, the Web is extraordinarily good at decentralizing data: everyone has their own website with their own location and storage. Some sites have managed to become large aggregators for a certain class of data, such as the various photo sharing sites or music sharing sites for example.

But when you really think about centralization vs. decentralization, the biggest aspect of centralization actually comes via large-scale aggregators like Google – because it doesn’t matter whether you put your data on Google or on your own site: you’re still putting it on Google in the end as they’re indexing everything.

The real lesson is that the power may not actually be in the data itself but rather in the control of access to that data. Google doesn’t have any raw data that the Web itself doesn’t have, but they have added intelligence to that data which makes it easier to find things.

To me, one of the seminal applications that made me think seriously about the Internet as Platform was Napster in contrast to MP3.com. I had visited MP3.com not long before Napster appeared and they were proudly showing me their servers with “all this music” on them. But then the kid who grew up in the age of the Internet came out with Napster and asked, “Why do you need to have all this music in one place? My friends already have it and all we need is our set of pointers.” It’s that evolution from data to metadata that’s really interesting to me and where people are going to get access to it.

There are some cases where a certain type of data is hard to generate, as in Digital Globe launching a satellite to supplement the US satellite data or NavTech driving the streets for 500 millions dollars plus to build a unique database –that’s one source of control. But the aggregators – the Yahoos, the Googles, the Amazons – are the other type of control with data that they don’t actually own but which they control with the namespace or the search space or some higher-level metadata.

I think that we’ll find in some ways that this is the real secret of the relationship between free and non-free content. There will be so much free content that it’s going to be hard to find and those who can help you find what you want will be able to charge for it – in one way or the other, whether it’s through advertising or through subscription or something else. It’s about managing to find “the best”, and “the best” is a kind of metadata.

OB: What developments potentially worry you in this space?

First off, I think there will always be negative developments. All new technology goes from its wonderful use when all things seem possible and then, [Tim laughs] we get the blue screen of death – that’s a natural alternation. When bad things happen, they’re just a part of the evolution and of the ongoing cycle.

What worries me the most are governments getting involved and backing their existing companies. The patent system is a great example where the government is clueless and is disrupting the real activity of the market. We see it in the way that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is trying to protect the interests of existing players while stifling the future. All of this is going to drive innovation to markets in countries that are more forward-looking because the internet is of course a global phenomenon and if you outlaw something, it will simply crop up somewhere else. So our challenge as an industry and as an economy is to discover the rules by which we can create value and ultimately create wealth in this new environment. It’s not about protecting the old ways of creating wealth but rather that creative destruction has to take place. Although companies may suffer from it, I think we’ll all be better for it.

OB: What upcoming developments excite you most and what do you see missing currently which you’d like to see grow?

I have been thinking a lot about “bionic software”, a concept that was introduced by You Mon Tsang Juman Zeng with his start-up called Boxxet, by which people are becoming components in software. I’ve talked about this for a number of years and I believe that Amazon’s Mechanical Turk might have been indirectly inspired by a talk I gave there in May of 2003. I talked about the Turk and asked, “What are the differences between web applications and PC applications?” Web applications have people inside of them. You take the people out of Amazon and it stops working. It’s not a one-time software artifact, instead it’s an ongoing process where people have to do things everyday for the software to keep working. So I referred to the Mechanical Turk, the chess-playing hoax which had a man inside, as a metaphor for the difference between internet applications and PC applications.

Amazon has given it a new twist and so have many other applications by harnessing the users to perform tasks that you couldn’t do with just the computer. And there is a really interesting thread there because for a long time, many people thought that we were going to arrive at some kind of artificial intelligence where we get the computers to be smart enough and match people. And what we’re doing instead is building a hybrid system, in which the computers make us smarter and we make them smarter – that’s bionic software.

When Google gives you 10 results and says, “One of these might be what you’re looking for”, it leaves us with the last mile. When a website uses a little CAPTCHA block, it’s asking that we do something that’s easy for humans but hard for computers when it comes to authentication.

The tag cloud also, which has spread from Flickr to all kinds of other websites, is a user-interface element that is basically built by the users of the system as the system is being used. So we are the software component that generates the tag cloud – we’re the input – and the tag cloud is a metaphor for this new kind of software.

OB: And to close what’s been a fascinating interview, I’m curious what you saw in the last month or two that stood out to you and sparked your curiosity.

There’s a site that’s essentially a “Hot-Or-Not” for avatars in virtual worlds [http://RateMyAv.com/] where you can put up your character from Second Life or World of Warcraft and get it rated by users just like the Hot-Or-Not site [http://www.HotOrNot.com/]. That was really interesting to me because it showed that the real and virtual are interpenetrating further. We’re going to see many of the things that took place on the web increasingly recapitulate themselves in some of these virtual worlds. There’s a real opportunity because many economic models out on the web could obviously be reproduced. It’s a cool, little signal of a future to come…

Bibliografia para o Workshop: Terranova, T. (2004), Network Culture. Politics for the Information Age

Ver aqui uma recensão de:

Terranova, T. (2004), Network Culture. Politics for the Information Age, London: Pluto Press.


http://www.metamute.org/en/Network-Culture

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Network Culture


9 February, 2005 - 00:00

By Steve Wright

Steve Wright reviews Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age
by Tiziana Terranova

"Tiziana Terranova is a name familiar to readers of Mute. Issue 28 carried a lively and informative discussion between Terranova and Marc Bousquet, addressing the contemporary university as both node of accumulation and site of social conflict.1 Of her other writings to date, pride of place goes to an influential essay on the peculiarities of that labour which capital has sought to subsume to its digital economy.2

Now we have Network Culture, an important work that deserves to be read and discussed widely. The book is rich in its scope: in particular, in the fruitful confrontations and collisions it sets up between internet culture and contemporary movements against global capital. At the same time, it is not always an easy read, given the complexity of some of the issues addressed and arguments advanced, and the familiarity presumed with a wide range of debates. Fortunately Terranova writes well and takes her readers seriously, so that the insights provided repay persistence with some of the book’s more difficult passages.

Network Culture offers a series of distinctive and original arguments, while finding inspiration in a range of different critical perspectives. In a fundamental way, however, Network Culture is very much an engagement with many of the key themes dear to the post-operaista (post-workerist) theories that emerged from the wreckage of the Italian autonomist movement of the 1970s. These theories have become familiar to English-language readers, above all through the writings of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Given the fascination with such ideas today in activist milieux, Network Culture is likely to find readers in circles well beyond the academy.

The first chapter explores a number of implications thrown up by Claude Shannon’s ‘classic’ conceptualisation of information in terms of the signal-noise relationship within a conduit linking sender and receiver. At this theory’s heart is a reading of the transmission of information as ‘the communication and exclusion of probable alternatives’ (p.20). What is so enjoyable about Terranova’s account here are the implications for political work that she draws out from her critical reading of this conduit metaphor of information. As Network Culture illustrates, the notion of communication that stems from this metaphor attempts to narrow the field to ‘alternatives formulated on the basis of known probabilities within the constraints set up by the interplay of code and channel or medium’ (p.25). If this is so, then what Terranova calls ‘a cultural politics of information’ must entail not merely a battle over the meaning of what currently informs us within late capitalism: It involves the opening up of the virtuality of the world by positing not simply different, but radically other codes and channels for expressing and giving expression to an undetermined potential for change. (p.26)

The second chapter of Network Culture explores a number of online practices such as packet switching, and asks whether these can help us resolve some of the more vexed problems within contemporary forms of political engagement. For example, does the internet’s open architecture – which in the face of difference, forgoes uniformity in favour of communication protocols – have something to tell us about challenges in terms of ‘extensibility’ currently facing movements against global capital and war? Here Terranova also reminds us how much online practices themselves have changed over the past decade since the takeoff of the World Wide Web, particularly in terms of community formation. The central chapter of the book is a slightly reworked version of Terranova’s essay on ‘Free Labour’. Beginning with a tilt at Richard Barbrook’s arguments concerning online anarcho-communism, the chapter grapples with the net-related unpaid labour performed outside the wage relation. Terranova is insistent that this labour, in all its pleasurableness for those concerned, is ‘a desire of labour immanent to late capitalism’ (p.94), and that claims about the anti-capitalist potentialities of movements such as open source must be offset by a healthy dose of scepticism. The fourth chapter follows on from this, discussing different aspects of that ‘soft control’ which attempts to turn labour’s potentialities towards capital’s continued reproduction. Network Culture then closes with a brief but enticing exploration of some of the key features that mark out ‘the virtual movements of this early twenty-first century’ (p.156), with the question of communication once again to the fore.

As should be obvious, Network Culture is part of a broader debate, and the book’s bibliography provides some helpful pathways into that wider discussion. Given the book’s central themes, it would be useful to examine its arguments alongside those of Ron Day, who has likewise engaged both with post-operaista theory, and information theory ‘classics’ such as Shannon, Weaver and Wiener.3 More provocatively, it would also be useful to read Network Culture alongside Doug Henwood’s latest offering on the ‘new economy’, and Ursula Huws thoughts on a growing ‘cybertariat’, both of which seek to meet capital’s claims about its new ‘weightless economy’ head on.4

As with any text worth reading, there is much to argue with in this book. Those not enamoured of the ‘immaterial labour’ thesis advanced by the post-operaisti will be perplexed by some of Network Culture’s arguments, not least the assertion that the work of writing/reading/managing and participating in mailing lists/websites/chat lines … falls outside the concept of ‘abstract labour’ (p.84).

In a similar vein, Terranova offers the following tantalising statement about another key post-operaista concept:

Unlike class, however, a multitude is not rooted in a solid class formation or a subjectifying function (although it is also a matter of class composition) (p.130).

She elaborates a little on this: the category multitude is of necessity ‘vague’ in that it seeks to denote something that while ‘not deny[ing] the existence of the stratification of identity and class’, nonetheless threatens to reach beyond them (p.130). Is this a case of wanting to have your cake and eat it too? How exactly might class composition analysis prove useful here? This question is not answered directly in Network Culture, even if a range of suggestive beginnings are provided in the second half of the book.

In the concluding paragraph of her original 2000 essay on ‘Free Labour’, Terranova argued as follows:

As the spectacular failure of the Italian autonomy reveals, the purpose of critical theory is not to elaborate strategies which then can be used to direct social change. On the contrary, as the tradition of cultural studies has less explicitly argued, it is about working on what already exists, on the lines established by a cultural and material activity which is already happening.5

Perhaps I also want to have my cake and eat it too, but why shouldn’t we aspire after both these goals? Certainly we don’t need strategy in the sense of some predefined pathway to salvation laid down from on high by specialists, whether these claim to be ‘theorists’ and/or ‘leaders’. But couldn’t strategy encompass a collective attempt to develop some sense of the directions in which we’d like to head, together or apart? Or at the bare minimum, some sense of what it is we seek in various ways to move away from? If so, then Network Culture can be seen as a stimulating contribution to the ongoing SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, oppurtunities, threats) analysis of contemporary power relations in and around online networks. We should all look forward to Terranova’s future offerings to the development of that ‘inventive and emotive political intelligence’ (p.157) which is so sorely needed today. a

1. T. Terranova & M. Bousquet, ‘Recomposing the University’, Mute issue 28, Summer-Autumn, 2004
2. T. Terranova, ‘Free labor: producing culture for the digital economy’, Social Text 63 Summer, 2000 http://www.uoc.edu/in3/hermeneia/sala_de_lectura/t_terranova_free_labor.htm
3. R. Day, The Modern Invention of Information: discourse, history and power, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001
4. D. Henwood, After The New Economy, New York: The New Press, 2003 ; U. Huws, ‘The Making of a Cybertariat: Virtual Work in a Real World’, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2003
5. T. Terranova, 2000, op. cit. "

Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age, London: Pluto Press, 2004 £14.99

Steve Wright is a lecturer in the School of Information Management & Systems, Monash University, and the author of Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism, London: Pluto Press, 2002

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Em complemento ver também:

Terranova, Tiziana. (2000). Free labor: producing culture for the digital economy. In Social Text, 63, Vol. 18, No. 2. http://www.btinternet.com/~t.terranova/freelab.html