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 (
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 (
Ends