There is one obvious term we could deploy to elucidate The L Word's teetering edifice of authenticity: ideology. But the status of ideological analysis today is dubious. The theory originates in Marxist thought, but its position within dialectical materialism has always been ambivalent. In orthodox Marxism, all ideas arise from the system of production as a set of material relations. However, this system cannot exist without the ideologies that naturalize it, nor are material conditions and ideology clearly separable. Marx and Engels write, "The phantoms formed in the human brain are... necessarily sublimates of their material life-process.... Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and the corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence" (47). Not only is ideology virtually material itself, certain ideas are necessary to the material economic relations of capitalism. Production, for example, cannot exist without consumption, which "posits the object of production as a concept, an internal image, a need, a motive, a purpose" -- as a "desire," in short -- and "Production accordingly produces not only an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object" (“Introduction to a Critique of Political Economy” 132-133). In Capital, Marx explains further that the commodity form on which capitalism depends is fundamentally a mystification, "a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things" (321). Thus it was never clear how we would study the ideological superstructure, society's accumulation of ideas, in isolation from its material base in production -- or vice versa.
The impossibility of extricating supposedly superstructural fictions from the economic base comes to fruition in the work of Louis Althusser. Acknowledging that the "reproduction of labor power" (that is, of the entire economic system) "reveals as its sine qua non... the reproduction of its subjection to the ruling ideology" (133), he ventures the theory of ideology that Marx never fully elaborates (158) (perhaps precisely because it requires engaging the interpenetration of base and superstructure). Althusser insists that ideology must be understood as having a "material existence," and furthermore that this materiality is contextualized in psychoanalytically-in?ected subjects: "1. there is no practice except by and in an ideology; 2. there is no ideology except by the subject and for subjects" (170). Already in Marx, desire is posed as central to consumption, and Althusser draws on psychoanalysis to theorize this function, defining ideology as the process that constitutes subjects and therefore their desires. He thus posits that ideology and materiality are articulated together via subjectivity, without necessarily resolving this binarization inherited from Marx.
Gramscian thought offers another potential revision of the untenable base/superstructure opposition in the concept of hegemony. Gramsci, according to Stuart Hall, "recognizes the 'plurality' of selves or identities of which the so-called 'subject' of thought and ideas is composed... a consequence of the relationship between 'the self' and the ideological discourses which compose the cultural terrain of a society" (433). Gramsci's model, that is, accommodates a more multiple (rather than dual) understanding of subjectivity, capitalist power, and ideologies role in mediating between them. Laclau and Mouffe identify hegemonic formations with the Althusserian concept of overdetermination -- "the critique of every type of fixity, through an affirmation of the incomplete, open and politically negotiable character of every identity" (104) -- however, they accuse Althusser of drifting away from this territory and into a regressive essentialism (97-98). A resolutely anti-essentialist Marxism, they assert, "af?rm[s] the material character of every discursive structure... the progressive affirmation, from Gramsci to Althusser, of the material character of ideologies" (109) and conversely "rejects the distinction between discursive and non-discursive practices" (107) -- that is, between superstructure and base. Laclau and Mouffe ultimately characterize societies as radically open, "precarious and ultimately failed attempts to domesticate the field of differences" (95). Thus over the past half-century, in dialogue with psychoanalytic and poststructuralist theory, Marxisms have been reconfigured to reject all stable identities and boundaries, including that between the supposedly material domain of production and the supposedly immaterial domain of ideology.
These theoretical innovations take Marx in new directions but are already implied in his work, where he presciently recognized the incredible vitality of capitalism, which "cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society" (The Communist Manifesto 58). As this situation wears on, "the productive forces at the disposal of society... become too powerful" to sustain existing conditions, necessitating either "enforced destruction... [or] the conquest of new markets" (60-61). Frederic Jameson credits Marx with a dialectical outlook on economic transformation, writing that here he "powerfully urges us to... a type of thinking that would be capable of grasping the demonstrably baleful features of capitalism along with its extraordinary and liberating dynamism simultaneously" (Postmodernism 47). One of the products not only of dialectical thinking about capitalism, but of the revolutionary dialectic of the capitalist system itself, is the heralding of what Jameson describes as the "inauguration of a whole new type of society, most famously bap/tized 'postindustrial society' (Daniel Bell) but often also designated consumer society, media society, information society, electronic society... (...a third stage or moment in the evolution of capital)" (3). Also known as late capitalism, this is the capitalist form native to what Jameson anatomizes, more precisely than most, as "postmodernism." While this term is usually deployed in either economic or aesthetic senses, Jameson reminds us elsewhere that "The becoming cultural of the economic, and the becoming economic of the cultural, has often been identi?ed as one of the features that characterizes what is now widely known as postmodernity" (“Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue” 60) -- what he calls "the libidinalization of the market" (69). At this stage, communication and information merge with technology in its materiality as a means of production, while in turn technology merges with the immateriality of commodification in its reliance on communication and information (56).
Among recent Marxisms, there is one heterodox strain that engages most dynamically with the profound transformations of late capitalism. Autonomia (Autonomism) emerged from a decade of social unrest in Italy, symbolically dated from 1968 (Bifo 149) but scaffolded by intellectual (Moulier 16) and activist (Moulier 5) schemas beginning by 1962. Its roots lie in protests by workers in northern Italy's large factories -- most famously the Taylorist FIAT factory, supposedly the largest in the world with around 100,000 employees (Moulier 13) -- but Autonomism was an emphatically decentralized movement, uniting disparate proletarians, local organizations, and theorists under the banner of the Potere Operaio (Workerists). Taylorism, the late capitalist successor to Fordism's assembly-line model for heavy industry, posits that "society as a whole functions and should function like a factory... [toward] socialization of all relations of production" (Moulier 17), and the Workerists responded with correspondingly innovative tactics of resistance based on the "looseness," "flexibility" and "fluidity" of an "elusive network" that "develops forms of organization and of subjectivity against which there exists no 'classic' response" (Lotringer & Marazzi 20). Social turmoil intensified in Italy throughout the 1970s, matched by rising unemployment, until it culminated in 1977 with a series of violent mass uprisings (Bifo 157-158). By 1974, the majority of the Workerist movement had split from a militant wing known as the Red Brigades, with the remainder adopting the name Autonomism (Lotringer and Marazzi 9). But when the Red Brigades kidnapped and assassinated Aldo Moro, President of the Christian Democratic Party, in 1978 (Bifo 160), the state took the crime as a pretense to exile or imprison thousands of Autonomists, issuing warrants on April 7, 1979 for intellectuals and activists including well-known thinker Antonio Negri (Lotringer v). These arrests and related repressions were effective at extinguishing Autonomist dissent in Italy, but collaterally they resulted in exiled theorists making contact with French post-structuralists and beyond, expanding the theoretical scope and international reach of their thought (Lotringer vi).
Translations of Autonomist works from Italian are a significant waypoint in this intellectual trajectory, and seminal English collections include the 1980 compendium Autonomia (the source for much of the above history) and Virno and Hardt's recent anthology Radical Thought in Italy. The latter republishes an influential essay by Maurizio Lazzarato on "Immaterial Labor" (this translation had previously appeared under the title "General Intellect: Towards an Inquiry into Immaterial Labor"). According to Lazzarato's diagnosis, immaterial labor, or "the labor that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity" (132), "seeks to involve even the worker's personality and subjectivity within the production of value" (135). While its "classic forms" encompass "audiovisual production, advertising, fashion, the production of software, photography, cultural activities" and "it exists only in the form of networks and flows" (136), immaterial labor is the hegemonic principle of late capitalist work even for those not directly engaged in these hyperskilled activities within the heterogeneous global economy (135). The pivotal premise of this elevation of mental and affective work is that "the 'raw material' of immaterial labor is subjectivity and the 'ideological' environment in which this subjectivity lives and reproduces": in a milieu that values intellectual property, branding, libidinalization (in Jameson's terms) over the manufacture of material goods, "[subjectivity] becomes directly productive, because the goal of our postindustrial society is to construct the consumer/communicator" (142). Communication, both in the abstract and as a function of information technologies, plays a vital role as the medium of subject formation and of cooperation between workers -- for Lazzarato, "If Fordism integrated consumption into the cycle of the reproduction of capital, post-Fordism integrates communication into it" (139). It is important to acknowledge the pronounced theoretical lacuna of Lazzarato's work (and indeed of the majority of Autonomist discourse): for a model that relies extensively on subjectivity, it offers little elaboration of this notion or engagement with existing conceptual frameworks (for example psychoanalysis, as per Althusser's approach, or Foucaldian micro-power). Nonetheless, this methodology offers a penetrating explication of late capitalism's directive to "'become subjects'" (134) that is available to be enhanced through continuing dialogue with complimentary traditions.
Immaterial labor can be the primary diagram of production in late capitalism precisely because the economy depends on a new kind of immaterial commodity, one that finds "its use value being given by its value as informational and cultural content" (137) -- that is, by its meaning for subjects. As Lazzarato succinctly puts it, "prior to being manufactured, a product must be sold" (140), thus reversing the Fordist system based in single-purpose factories and turning to "just-in-time" schemes where supply responds to demand. Moreover, the paradigmatic immaterial commodity, not being fixed in a physical object (think of a trademark or an mp3 file, for example), "is not destroyed in the act of consumption, but rather it enlarges, transforms, and creates the 'ideological' and cultural environment of the consumer" (137). The crucial ramifications of this ascent of the culture and information industries involve "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," rendering it "the result of a creative process that involves both the producer and the consumer" (141). Lazzarato's assessment of this transformation is ultimately rather optimistic: since capitalism "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" (144), a mechanism that is provisional and precarious. This outlook applies to immaterial labor power as well, for if "the management mandate to 'become subjects of communication' threatens to be even more totalitarian," employers are correspondingly "forced to recognize the autonomy and freedom of labor as the only possible form of cooperation in production" (135). It is this autonomy, the relocalization of value in subjects and their self-organizing networks of communication, that gives Autonomism its name. It is critical, however, that we weigh these possibilities for resistance against the perils of a capitalist regime that subsumes ever more of our identity and sociality under its imperatives.
[ read Lazzarato's "Immaterial Labor" online ]
The impossibility of extricating supposedly superstructural fictions from the economic base comes to fruition in the work of Louis Althusser. Acknowledging that the "reproduction of labor power" (that is, of the entire economic system) "reveals as its sine qua non... the reproduction of its subjection to the ruling ideology" (133), he ventures the theory of ideology that Marx never fully elaborates (158) (perhaps precisely because it requires engaging the interpenetration of base and superstructure). Althusser insists that ideology must be understood as having a "material existence," and furthermore that this materiality is contextualized in psychoanalytically-in?ected subjects: "1. there is no practice except by and in an ideology; 2. there is no ideology except by the subject and for subjects" (170). Already in Marx, desire is posed as central to consumption, and Althusser draws on psychoanalysis to theorize this function, defining ideology as the process that constitutes subjects and therefore their desires. He thus posits that ideology and materiality are articulated together via subjectivity, without necessarily resolving this binarization inherited from Marx.
Gramscian thought offers another potential revision of the untenable base/superstructure opposition in the concept of hegemony. Gramsci, according to Stuart Hall, "recognizes the 'plurality' of selves or identities of which the so-called 'subject' of thought and ideas is composed... a consequence of the relationship between 'the self' and the ideological discourses which compose the cultural terrain of a society" (433). Gramsci's model, that is, accommodates a more multiple (rather than dual) understanding of subjectivity, capitalist power, and ideologies role in mediating between them. Laclau and Mouffe identify hegemonic formations with the Althusserian concept of overdetermination -- "the critique of every type of fixity, through an affirmation of the incomplete, open and politically negotiable character of every identity" (104) -- however, they accuse Althusser of drifting away from this territory and into a regressive essentialism (97-98). A resolutely anti-essentialist Marxism, they assert, "af?rm[s] the material character of every discursive structure... the progressive affirmation, from Gramsci to Althusser, of the material character of ideologies" (109) and conversely "rejects the distinction between discursive and non-discursive practices" (107) -- that is, between superstructure and base. Laclau and Mouffe ultimately characterize societies as radically open, "precarious and ultimately failed attempts to domesticate the field of differences" (95). Thus over the past half-century, in dialogue with psychoanalytic and poststructuralist theory, Marxisms have been reconfigured to reject all stable identities and boundaries, including that between the supposedly material domain of production and the supposedly immaterial domain of ideology.
These theoretical innovations take Marx in new directions but are already implied in his work, where he presciently recognized the incredible vitality of capitalism, which "cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society" (The Communist Manifesto 58). As this situation wears on, "the productive forces at the disposal of society... become too powerful" to sustain existing conditions, necessitating either "enforced destruction... [or] the conquest of new markets" (60-61). Frederic Jameson credits Marx with a dialectical outlook on economic transformation, writing that here he "powerfully urges us to... a type of thinking that would be capable of grasping the demonstrably baleful features of capitalism along with its extraordinary and liberating dynamism simultaneously" (Postmodernism 47). One of the products not only of dialectical thinking about capitalism, but of the revolutionary dialectic of the capitalist system itself, is the heralding of what Jameson describes as the "inauguration of a whole new type of society, most famously bap/tized 'postindustrial society' (Daniel Bell) but often also designated consumer society, media society, information society, electronic society... (...a third stage or moment in the evolution of capital)" (3). Also known as late capitalism, this is the capitalist form native to what Jameson anatomizes, more precisely than most, as "postmodernism." While this term is usually deployed in either economic or aesthetic senses, Jameson reminds us elsewhere that "The becoming cultural of the economic, and the becoming economic of the cultural, has often been identi?ed as one of the features that characterizes what is now widely known as postmodernity" (“Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue” 60) -- what he calls "the libidinalization of the market" (69). At this stage, communication and information merge with technology in its materiality as a means of production, while in turn technology merges with the immateriality of commodification in its reliance on communication and information (56).
Among recent Marxisms, there is one heterodox strain that engages most dynamically with the profound transformations of late capitalism. Autonomia (Autonomism) emerged from a decade of social unrest in Italy, symbolically dated from 1968 (Bifo 149) but scaffolded by intellectual (Moulier 16) and activist (Moulier 5) schemas beginning by 1962. Its roots lie in protests by workers in northern Italy's large factories -- most famously the Taylorist FIAT factory, supposedly the largest in the world with around 100,000 employees (Moulier 13) -- but Autonomism was an emphatically decentralized movement, uniting disparate proletarians, local organizations, and theorists under the banner of the Potere Operaio (Workerists). Taylorism, the late capitalist successor to Fordism's assembly-line model for heavy industry, posits that "society as a whole functions and should function like a factory... [toward] socialization of all relations of production" (Moulier 17), and the Workerists responded with correspondingly innovative tactics of resistance based on the "looseness," "flexibility" and "fluidity" of an "elusive network" that "develops forms of organization and of subjectivity against which there exists no 'classic' response" (Lotringer & Marazzi 20). Social turmoil intensified in Italy throughout the 1970s, matched by rising unemployment, until it culminated in 1977 with a series of violent mass uprisings (Bifo 157-158). By 1974, the majority of the Workerist movement had split from a militant wing known as the Red Brigades, with the remainder adopting the name Autonomism (Lotringer and Marazzi 9). But when the Red Brigades kidnapped and assassinated Aldo Moro, President of the Christian Democratic Party, in 1978 (Bifo 160), the state took the crime as a pretense to exile or imprison thousands of Autonomists, issuing warrants on April 7, 1979 for intellectuals and activists including well-known thinker Antonio Negri (Lotringer v). These arrests and related repressions were effective at extinguishing Autonomist dissent in Italy, but collaterally they resulted in exiled theorists making contact with French post-structuralists and beyond, expanding the theoretical scope and international reach of their thought (Lotringer vi).
Translations of Autonomist works from Italian are a significant waypoint in this intellectual trajectory, and seminal English collections include the 1980 compendium Autonomia (the source for much of the above history) and Virno and Hardt's recent anthology Radical Thought in Italy. The latter republishes an influential essay by Maurizio Lazzarato on "Immaterial Labor" (this translation had previously appeared under the title "General Intellect: Towards an Inquiry into Immaterial Labor"). According to Lazzarato's diagnosis, immaterial labor, or "the labor that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity" (132), "seeks to involve even the worker's personality and subjectivity within the production of value" (135). While its "classic forms" encompass "audiovisual production, advertising, fashion, the production of software, photography, cultural activities" and "it exists only in the form of networks and flows" (136), immaterial labor is the hegemonic principle of late capitalist work even for those not directly engaged in these hyperskilled activities within the heterogeneous global economy (135). The pivotal premise of this elevation of mental and affective work is that "the 'raw material' of immaterial labor is subjectivity and the 'ideological' environment in which this subjectivity lives and reproduces": in a milieu that values intellectual property, branding, libidinalization (in Jameson's terms) over the manufacture of material goods, "[subjectivity] becomes directly productive, because the goal of our postindustrial society is to construct the consumer/communicator" (142). Communication, both in the abstract and as a function of information technologies, plays a vital role as the medium of subject formation and of cooperation between workers -- for Lazzarato, "If Fordism integrated consumption into the cycle of the reproduction of capital, post-Fordism integrates communication into it" (139). It is important to acknowledge the pronounced theoretical lacuna of Lazzarato's work (and indeed of the majority of Autonomist discourse): for a model that relies extensively on subjectivity, it offers little elaboration of this notion or engagement with existing conceptual frameworks (for example psychoanalysis, as per Althusser's approach, or Foucaldian micro-power). Nonetheless, this methodology offers a penetrating explication of late capitalism's directive to "'become subjects'" (134) that is available to be enhanced through continuing dialogue with complimentary traditions.
Immaterial labor can be the primary diagram of production in late capitalism precisely because the economy depends on a new kind of immaterial commodity, one that finds "its use value being given by its value as informational and cultural content" (137) -- that is, by its meaning for subjects. As Lazzarato succinctly puts it, "prior to being manufactured, a product must be sold" (140), thus reversing the Fordist system based in single-purpose factories and turning to "just-in-time" schemes where supply responds to demand. Moreover, the paradigmatic immaterial commodity, not being fixed in a physical object (think of a trademark or an mp3 file, for example), "is not destroyed in the act of consumption, but rather it enlarges, transforms, and creates the 'ideological' and cultural environment of the consumer" (137). The crucial ramifications of this ascent of the culture and information industries involve "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," rendering it "the result of a creative process that involves both the producer and the consumer" (141). Lazzarato's assessment of this transformation is ultimately rather optimistic: since capitalism "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" (144), a mechanism that is provisional and precarious. This outlook applies to immaterial labor power as well, for if "the management mandate to 'become subjects of communication' threatens to be even more totalitarian," employers are correspondingly "forced to recognize the autonomy and freedom of labor as the only possible form of cooperation in production" (135). It is this autonomy, the relocalization of value in subjects and their self-organizing networks of communication, that gives Autonomism its name. It is critical, however, that we weigh these possibilities for resistance against the perils of a capitalist regime that subsumes ever more of our identity and sociality under its imperatives.
[ read Lazzarato's "Immaterial Labor" online ]
