GENERAL
INTELLECT: Towards an Inquiry into Immaterial Labour
by
Maurizio Lazzarato
translated
by Ed Emery
[TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: This is a rough working
version. I have put it on this site while we work on the final text. Please do
not copy or circulate]
There
has by now been a significant quantity of empirical research into the new forms
of organisation 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 organisations in
the tertiary sector where the jobs of immediate labour are increasingly
subordinated to the capactities 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 valorisation"
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 grtasp 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 valorisation".
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 intellectualised 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 organised around its immateriality. This
transformation of working- class labour into labour of control, of management
of information, into a decision-making capacity which requirtes the investment
of subjectivity, touches workers in varying ways, according to their function
within the factory heirarchy, 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
organising 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 organisation 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 analysed "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 mobilises 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 organisation; what
has changed is the content. Second, if it is no longer possible to
individualise rigidly tasks and competences (labour as it is imposed by the
scientific organisation 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 normalised 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 communcative 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 recognise 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 organisation 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 avoind 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 de-
centred 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: audio- visual 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 organisation of its cycle of production,
because this is precisely what we are dealing with, once we abandon our
factoryist pre- judgements) is not immediately visible because it is not
confined by the walls of a factory. The localtion 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 organised 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, hyper- exploitation, mobility and hierarchy are what
characterise metropolitan immaterial labour. Behind the label of the
"independent or dependent" worker is hidden a true and proper
intellectual proletarian, recognised 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, characterised 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 materialises 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 organise 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 organisation 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
organisation 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 organisation which industrial centralisation allows
to it. On this terrain, and on the same basis, two schools differ: one is the
extension of the neo- classical 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 organisation, 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 optimisation introduced, etc.
In
reality, the neo-classical model finds great difficulties in freeing itself
from the constrictions of coherenece imposed by the theory of general
equilibrium. The new phenomenologies of labour, the new dimensions of
organisation, 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 organisation, 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, organisation 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 organisational 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
organisation of work and of its social territory, within which the afficiacious
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
organisation can lead us beyond the presuppositions of enterprise theory -
which itself developed under the form of the neo- classical 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 postFordism, 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
organisation) 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/Organisation
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 organisation of the
collective capitalist. During the 1980s, at a worldwide level, production and
command were re- articulated 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.
End