User:Birgit bachler/readings2/lazzarato immaterial

Immaterial Labour - Maurizio Lazzarato (Lavoro Immateriale. Forme di vita e produzione di soggettivita' (ombre corte, 1997))

• new forms of the organization of work, the concept of immaterial labor: labor that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity

• "informational content", cybernetics & computer control <> "cultural content" activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms & public opinion

• end of the 1970s: "mass intellectuality", modifications in composition, management, regulation of workforce & role and function of intellectuals and their activities within society

• "new communications technologies increasingly require subjectivities that are rich in knowledge" (p.1)

• the interface gives more decision power to the worker

• "subjectivity in its collective form expressed itself as a clash between social classes within the organization of work" (p. 2)

• "one has to express oneself, one has to speak, communicate, cooperate and so forth"

• "subjects of that production must be capable of communication - they must be active participants within a work team" (p. 2)

• "Today's management thinking takes workers' subjectivity into consideration only in order to codify it in line with the requirements of production" * (p.2)

• " the particularity of the commodity produced through immaterial labor (…) 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 (…) transforms the person who uses it. Immaterial labour produces first and foremost a "social relationship" ( a relationship of innovation, production, and consumption). (p.5)

• "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." … "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." (p. 8)

• "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." … "ceases to be an instrument of social control" … "our postindustrial society is to construct the consumer/communicator and to construct it as "active"." … "establish a demand" … "capitalist production has invaded our lives and has broken down all the oppositions among economy, power and knowledge." "The process of social connection (and its principal content, the production of subjectivity) becomes here directly productive because in a certain way it produces production." (p. 8)