Marx already recognized that advancements in information technologies are integral to the expansion of capitalism, writing in The Communist Manifesto that it is "by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, [AND] by the immensely facilitated means of communication" that the capitalist economy "draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization" (59) -- but today this role is escalating. In The Condition of Post-Modernity, one of the key texts delineating the transition to late capitalism, David Harvey observes that, in prelude, "the progress of Fordism internationally... relied heavily upon new-found capacities to gather, evaluate, and disseminate information" (137). What is novel under post-Fordism is that information has progressed from being an important by-product of production systems to a product in its own right, with its own markets and its own producers and consumers. As Joseph Stigliz puts it, "knowledge itself becomes a key commodity, to be produced and sold to the highest bidder" (159). The amplification of concern and controversy over intellectual property controls is one instance of the effects of this decisive shift. Beyond the exchange of informational commodities, however, communication furnishes the platform for subjectivity, which is now an equally vital axis of economic value. According to Harvey, the late capitalist manufacturing regime of "flexible accumulation has been accompanied on the consumption side, therefore, by a much greater attention to quick-changing fashions and the mobilization of the arti?ces of need inducement and cultural transformation that this implies" (156). When affective connotations of lifestyle and identity become the key selling point, that is, an immaterial aura of desire becomes the key product. Under these conditions, social communication, or "control over information flow and over the vehicles for propagation of popular taste and culture[,] have likewise become vital weapons in the competitive struggle" (160). Consider, for example, the rise of expansive and multimodal marketing strategies including branding, product placement, transmedia, and the overarching corporate consolidation of entertainment (the other meaning of "media convergence") -- evidence that investment in communicative infrastructure and management is essential to maximizing the value of subjectivity as immaterial labor.
Intersecting with these assessments of present-day industry by political economists, social theorists have articulated the notion of an information economy. Hardt and Negri christen this new milieu "Empire," defining its topography as "a rhizomatic and universal communication network in which relations are established to and from all its points or nodes" (319-20). The network model is simultaneously metaphorical and literal: relations of power in Empire behave like computerized communications systems, and they also are in large part implanted in the deployment of network technologies. In this "information economy" of "deterritorialized production" and "immaterial labor," the methods of production, the commodities produced, and the subjectivities of the producer-consumers become increasingly intertwined. Ultimately, since "the instrumental action of economic production has been united with the communicative action of human relations" (293), "the great industrial and financial powers thus produce not only commodities but also subjectivities... needs, social relations, bodies, and minds -- which is to say, they produce producers" (232). Manuel Castells also blends the figurative and material aspects of networks when he pronounces "a new form of society": this "network society" is "characterized by... the flexibility and instability of work, and the individualization of labor[, and by] a culture of real virtuality constructed by a pervasive, interconnected, and diversified media system" (1). Castells' thesis is that, in the network society, "The new power lies in the codes of information and in the images of representation... The sites of this power are people's minds... This is why identities are so important, and ultimately, so powerful" (424-25). That is, as the network becomes the dominant organizational form across all cultural registers, the immaterial dimensions of discourse, spectacle, and subjectivity come to occupy a position of unprecedented privilege in the economic landscape. Thus capacities for communication, in terms of both human "software" and technological hardware, scaffold late capitalism's regime of value.
For their part, Autonomists have theorized this conjuncture by refining Marx's concept of real subsumption to provide a diagnosis of our current circumstances. Building on their work and on his own re-readings of Marx's texts, Jason Read explains that the continuum from formal to real subsumption encapsulates the evolution of capitalism. Formal subsumption is characterized by "the imposition of the wage on preexisting social and technological structures" (10), in other words, by layering capitalism's structural abstractions, including money as a universal exchange and the mystification that workers must sell their labor power, over given material cultures. At some point, however, the limit of the surplus value that can be extracted by simply extending labor is reached (for example, the length of the workday can be increased only so many hours), and capitalism must begin to reshape the constraints of work in order to render the available labor time more productive. In the course of this process, capitalism permeates and appropriates more and more domains of life, such that "what is originally outside of capital, the social and technical conditions of labor, becomes internalized" (114). This amounts to "a transformation... of the knowledges, desires, and practices constitutive of social relations" (113), and we can say that today, with the incorporation of subjectivity itself into capitalist production, we have fully arrived at the state of real subsumption. In Negri's classic Autonomist text, The Politics of Subversion, he maintains that the transition to real subsumption entails a qualitative shift in the organization of work, writing that "the movement from capital's subjection of society to the active prefiguration of society by capital involves, within it, the constitution of an increasingly high and intense degree of productive cooperation... At this point, in order to exist, individual labour needs to be inserted into the framework of social labour [and] collectivity is a necessary condition for work" (82). Because labor relations grow in complexity and scope until they are coextensive with the entirety of social relations, real subsumption hinges on the emergence of collective communications networks.
Autonomism has termed this late capitalist schema the "social factory." As Negri describes it, here "work abandons the [literal] factory in order to find, precisely in the social, a place adequate to the functions of concentrating productive activity and transforming it into value. The prerequisites of these processes are present in, and diffused throughout, society... [including] such infrastructures as communications networks" (89). This is to say that the present-day analogue of the Fordist factory's machines, which constitute fixed capital that needs living labor to animate it, is the matrix of technological and cultural assets that are activated by their collective users. Negri contends that, because communication is integral to economic labor, particularly the labor of subjectivity itself, late capitalism dictates that "every subject of this productive complex is caught up in overpowering cooperative networks" (77). So today's "socialized worker... is a producer, but not only a producer of value and surplus value; s/he is also the producer of the social cooperation necessary for work" (80), that is, a producer of the collective conditions of production as well as of products themselves. Autonomists understand labor power within this system in terms of Marx's concept of the "general intellect," amounting to knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge, the burgeoning significance of which we now recognize as the information economy. Paulo Virno reconfigured this idea away from what Marx conceived of "as a scientific objectified capacity, as a system of machines" (65), arguing that "the connection between knowledge and production is not at all exhausted within the system of machines; on the contrary, it articulates itself in... formal and informal knowledge, imagination, ethical propensities, mindsets, and 'linguistic games'.... thoughts and discourses which function as productive 'machines'" (106). Virno asserts that, in order for late capitalism to function, "it is necessary that a part of the general intellect not congeal as fixed capital but unfold in communicative interaction" (65), thus mandating that the workforce retain a degree of autonomy from objectification and rationalization. This notion of an "intellectuality of the masses," in Virno's words, is akin to what some thinkers today evangelize as "collective intelligence": the idea that a group of organisms can form a symbiosis that is more productive than the sum of their individual knowledge and labor power. From a Marxist perspective, "collective intelligence" is prescribed by the late capitalist economic network, an artifact of its subsumption of all spheres of sociality -- however, this does not imply that labor is always fully subservient to capitalist demands.
According to Virno, a consequence of the transition to the social factory is that, in contrast to the Fordist model which divided labor from leisure (when the worker might "read the newspaper, go to the local party headquarters, think, have conversations"), there is now no "threshold separating labor time from non-labor time... since the 'life of the mind' is included fully within the time-space of production, an essential homogeneity prevails" (103). Because a wage is now the only distinguishing factor, Virno suggests "it could be said that: unemployment is non-remunerated labor and labor, in turn, is remunerated unemployment" (103). Think of this in terms of fan production: setting aside the massive scale of the television industry, the activities of paid and unpaid creative workers are not functionally different. Fans research, write, film, edit, and discuss media stories, often with a high level of skill and dedication, while professionals assert their own fannish credibility by conveying the impression that they work for fun. As labor becomes increasingly nebulous and omnipresent, expanding to encompass all social and subjective activity, "the productive cooperation in which labor-power participates is always larger and richer than the one put into play by the labor process... Labor-power increases the value of capital only because it never loses its qualities of non-labor" (Virno 103). This ecology generates challenges, in turn, for capitalist expropriation. As Negri puts it: "Value exists wherever social locations of working cooperation are to be found and wherever accumulated and hidden labour is extracted from the turgid depths of society. This value is not reducible to a common standard. Rather, it is excessive... [so] we must abandon the illusory notion of measurement" (91-92). The Nielsen company's measurement of television ratings, for example, has been pushed toward an assortment of experimental metrics that aim to capture the "excessive" value of subjectivity and collectivity. Among them is 2007's Hey! Nielsen, "a new online social community, with... features such as ratings (like Q Ratings), the ability to submit opinions and comments, to connect and to create a network of recommenders... Its goal is to get fans rating, reviewing and blogging about their favorite shows, movies and stars" (MacDermid). By creating a social networking website in an attempt to mine qualitative data in communicative form, Nielsen acknowledges the unruly, unquantifiable character of late capitalism's immaterial commodities. The reporter quotes Nielsen executive Peter Blackshaw, who says that "understanding passion is the next frontier of market research... we are paying very close attention to the root drivers and nuances around this level of emotion-charged consumer engagement." Because affective and subjective labor are now the foremost axes of value, Virno proposes that the culture industry occupies a privileged place in this regime:
Intersecting with these assessments of present-day industry by political economists, social theorists have articulated the notion of an information economy. Hardt and Negri christen this new milieu "Empire," defining its topography as "a rhizomatic and universal communication network in which relations are established to and from all its points or nodes" (319-20). The network model is simultaneously metaphorical and literal: relations of power in Empire behave like computerized communications systems, and they also are in large part implanted in the deployment of network technologies. In this "information economy" of "deterritorialized production" and "immaterial labor," the methods of production, the commodities produced, and the subjectivities of the producer-consumers become increasingly intertwined. Ultimately, since "the instrumental action of economic production has been united with the communicative action of human relations" (293), "the great industrial and financial powers thus produce not only commodities but also subjectivities... needs, social relations, bodies, and minds -- which is to say, they produce producers" (232). Manuel Castells also blends the figurative and material aspects of networks when he pronounces "a new form of society": this "network society" is "characterized by... the flexibility and instability of work, and the individualization of labor[, and by] a culture of real virtuality constructed by a pervasive, interconnected, and diversified media system" (1). Castells' thesis is that, in the network society, "The new power lies in the codes of information and in the images of representation... The sites of this power are people's minds... This is why identities are so important, and ultimately, so powerful" (424-25). That is, as the network becomes the dominant organizational form across all cultural registers, the immaterial dimensions of discourse, spectacle, and subjectivity come to occupy a position of unprecedented privilege in the economic landscape. Thus capacities for communication, in terms of both human "software" and technological hardware, scaffold late capitalism's regime of value.
For their part, Autonomists have theorized this conjuncture by refining Marx's concept of real subsumption to provide a diagnosis of our current circumstances. Building on their work and on his own re-readings of Marx's texts, Jason Read explains that the continuum from formal to real subsumption encapsulates the evolution of capitalism. Formal subsumption is characterized by "the imposition of the wage on preexisting social and technological structures" (10), in other words, by layering capitalism's structural abstractions, including money as a universal exchange and the mystification that workers must sell their labor power, over given material cultures. At some point, however, the limit of the surplus value that can be extracted by simply extending labor is reached (for example, the length of the workday can be increased only so many hours), and capitalism must begin to reshape the constraints of work in order to render the available labor time more productive. In the course of this process, capitalism permeates and appropriates more and more domains of life, such that "what is originally outside of capital, the social and technical conditions of labor, becomes internalized" (114). This amounts to "a transformation... of the knowledges, desires, and practices constitutive of social relations" (113), and we can say that today, with the incorporation of subjectivity itself into capitalist production, we have fully arrived at the state of real subsumption. In Negri's classic Autonomist text, The Politics of Subversion, he maintains that the transition to real subsumption entails a qualitative shift in the organization of work, writing that "the movement from capital's subjection of society to the active prefiguration of society by capital involves, within it, the constitution of an increasingly high and intense degree of productive cooperation... At this point, in order to exist, individual labour needs to be inserted into the framework of social labour [and] collectivity is a necessary condition for work" (82). Because labor relations grow in complexity and scope until they are coextensive with the entirety of social relations, real subsumption hinges on the emergence of collective communications networks.
Autonomism has termed this late capitalist schema the "social factory." As Negri describes it, here "work abandons the [literal] factory in order to find, precisely in the social, a place adequate to the functions of concentrating productive activity and transforming it into value. The prerequisites of these processes are present in, and diffused throughout, society... [including] such infrastructures as communications networks" (89). This is to say that the present-day analogue of the Fordist factory's machines, which constitute fixed capital that needs living labor to animate it, is the matrix of technological and cultural assets that are activated by their collective users. Negri contends that, because communication is integral to economic labor, particularly the labor of subjectivity itself, late capitalism dictates that "every subject of this productive complex is caught up in overpowering cooperative networks" (77). So today's "socialized worker... is a producer, but not only a producer of value and surplus value; s/he is also the producer of the social cooperation necessary for work" (80), that is, a producer of the collective conditions of production as well as of products themselves. Autonomists understand labor power within this system in terms of Marx's concept of the "general intellect," amounting to knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge, the burgeoning significance of which we now recognize as the information economy. Paulo Virno reconfigured this idea away from what Marx conceived of "as a scientific objectified capacity, as a system of machines" (65), arguing that "the connection between knowledge and production is not at all exhausted within the system of machines; on the contrary, it articulates itself in... formal and informal knowledge, imagination, ethical propensities, mindsets, and 'linguistic games'.... thoughts and discourses which function as productive 'machines'" (106). Virno asserts that, in order for late capitalism to function, "it is necessary that a part of the general intellect not congeal as fixed capital but unfold in communicative interaction" (65), thus mandating that the workforce retain a degree of autonomy from objectification and rationalization. This notion of an "intellectuality of the masses," in Virno's words, is akin to what some thinkers today evangelize as "collective intelligence": the idea that a group of organisms can form a symbiosis that is more productive than the sum of their individual knowledge and labor power. From a Marxist perspective, "collective intelligence" is prescribed by the late capitalist economic network, an artifact of its subsumption of all spheres of sociality -- however, this does not imply that labor is always fully subservient to capitalist demands.
According to Virno, a consequence of the transition to the social factory is that, in contrast to the Fordist model which divided labor from leisure (when the worker might "read the newspaper, go to the local party headquarters, think, have conversations"), there is now no "threshold separating labor time from non-labor time... since the 'life of the mind' is included fully within the time-space of production, an essential homogeneity prevails" (103). Because a wage is now the only distinguishing factor, Virno suggests "it could be said that: unemployment is non-remunerated labor and labor, in turn, is remunerated unemployment" (103). Think of this in terms of fan production: setting aside the massive scale of the television industry, the activities of paid and unpaid creative workers are not functionally different. Fans research, write, film, edit, and discuss media stories, often with a high level of skill and dedication, while professionals assert their own fannish credibility by conveying the impression that they work for fun. As labor becomes increasingly nebulous and omnipresent, expanding to encompass all social and subjective activity, "the productive cooperation in which labor-power participates is always larger and richer than the one put into play by the labor process... Labor-power increases the value of capital only because it never loses its qualities of non-labor" (Virno 103). This ecology generates challenges, in turn, for capitalist expropriation. As Negri puts it: "Value exists wherever social locations of working cooperation are to be found and wherever accumulated and hidden labour is extracted from the turgid depths of society. This value is not reducible to a common standard. Rather, it is excessive... [so] we must abandon the illusory notion of measurement" (91-92). The Nielsen company's measurement of television ratings, for example, has been pushed toward an assortment of experimental metrics that aim to capture the "excessive" value of subjectivity and collectivity. Among them is 2007's Hey! Nielsen, "a new online social community, with... features such as ratings (like Q Ratings), the ability to submit opinions and comments, to connect and to create a network of recommenders... Its goal is to get fans rating, reviewing and blogging about their favorite shows, movies and stars" (MacDermid). By creating a social networking website in an attempt to mine qualitative data in communicative form, Nielsen acknowledges the unruly, unquantifiable character of late capitalism's immaterial commodities. The reporter quotes Nielsen executive Peter Blackshaw, who says that "understanding passion is the next frontier of market research... we are paying very close attention to the root drivers and nuances around this level of emotion-charged consumer engagement." Because affective and subjective labor are now the foremost axes of value, Virno proposes that the culture industry occupies a privileged place in this regime:
[it] is an industry among others... [but] it also plays the role of industry of the means of production. Traditionally, the industry of the means of production is the industry that produces machinery and other instruments to be used in the most varied sectors of production. However, in a situation in which the means of production are not reducible to machines but consist of linguistic-cognitive competencies inseparable from living labor... [t]he culture industry produces (regenerates, experiments with) communicative procedures, which are then destined to function also as means of production (61)Mass media and entertainment are effectively a machine shop for the social factory, furnishing the equipment for immaterial laborers within a communicative network. Autonomism's pivotal argument is that this labor, which is necessarily collective in organization and ubiquitous in scope, is not simply absorbed without resistance into the smooth space of capitalism, but rather negotiated through a process of struggle with capitalism's perpetually insufficient procedures.
