Capitalism: Return of the Subjectivity Snatcher

In order to prevent the potential autonomy of labor, Paolo Virno asserts that capital employs precisely “that which is common, that is, the intellect and language” (68). Suely Rolnik colorfully states that capital has become creativity’s pimp (“The Geopolitics of Pimping”). By moving away from the Fordist assembly line to a networked organization, capital provides what Brian Holmes terms the “flexible personality” of social laborers the creative space for self-valorization (“The Flexible Personality”). In a network where social laborers are given the freedom to manage their own projects, Holmes argues, “individuals aspire to mix their labor with their leisure” (“The Flexible Personality”). Sylvère Lotringer notes that the surplus value extracted by the network stems from “the idle time of the mind that keeps enriching, unacknowledged, the fruits of immaterial labor” (Forward). The industrial factory has been replaced by Mario Tronti’s “social factory” (“Social Capital”) and Antonio Negri’s “factory without walls” (The Politics of Subversion 204) creating the current situation in which “the temporal measure of exploitation has become not the working day but the life-span” (Dyer-Witheford).

Yikes! It seems our subjectivity, as Félix Guattari would say, has been snatched by capitalism!

Works cited

Dyer-Witheford, Nick. “Autonomist Marxism and the Information Society.” Multitudes 3 June 2004. Web.

Holmes, Brian. “The Flexible Personality: For a New Cultural Critique.” European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies Jan 2002. Web.

Lotringer, Sylvère. “We, the Multitude.” Forward. A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. By Paolo Virno. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext, 2004. 7-19. Print.

Negri, Antonio. The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2005. Print.

Rolnik, Suely. “The Geopolitics of Pimping.” European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies Oct 2006. Web.

Tronti, Mario. “Social Capital.” Telos 17 (1973): 98-121. Print.

Virno, Paolo. A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext, 2004. Print.

Photo from http://www.examiner.com/review/invasion-of-the-body-snatchers-made-waves-as-the-first-great-horror-remake

It’s only non-sense, but I like it, like it – yes I do!

The Mortgage Law (Ley Hipotecaria) in Spain does not make sense. It’s crazy. In the U.S., if you are unable to continue paying your mortgage and you are forced into foreclosure, the bank repossesses your house and sells it in order to recuperate the original loan to you. Once the bank evicts you and takes your property, your debt is cleared. In Spain, if your home has lost market value and the bank is unable to sell it for the original purchase price, it is your responsibility to pay off the difference. In other words, foreclosure does not automatically eliminate your debt.

A worsening Spanish economy with an unemployment rate hovering around 25% for the general population and as high as 50% for young adults has led to the eviction of 400,000 Spaniards from their homes since 2008.  Recent suicides related to foreclosures attest to a growing feeling of hopelessness and despair. My initial response to this awful situation is to demonize the bankers and capitalism. What a senseless, crazy system! However, it is always important to take a critical stance. So, I’ll play the devil’s advocate. The Spanish Mortgage Law actually makes more sense than that of the U.S. If you loaned a friend $150,000 with the agreement that the money would be returned in its entirety at a later date, you would probably be upset if you only received half of it back. It is perfectly logical that you would feel that way. It makes sense. The banks, too, just want their money back. That’s rational. I would argue, however, that the problem is precisely our allegiance to that rationality. We need to counter the logic of capitalism with NON-SENSE, with a different logic, with a different value system.

What’s crazy is not the Spanish Mortgage Law, but solidarity and compassion with regard to others. A group of activists in Spain known as Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca is getting “crazy.” It uses its creativity to access non-sense and to multiply it. How? One example is the following video that they produced in which they use satire to undermine the Spanish State’s stance on home ownership:

This group is calling for a massive demonstration in favor of decent and adequate housing for all Spaniards February 16, 2013.

To show your support, you can visit their website: http://afectadosporlahipoteca.com/manifestacion-16f/

CFP: Between Capitalist and Communist Utopias

Leipzig, Germany, June 21 – 23, 2013
Deadline: Feb 1, 2013

Paper proposals are solicited for the conference, “Second World Urbanity: Between Capitalist and Communist Utopias,” which will be held at The Center for the History and Culture of East Central Europe, in Leipzig, Germany, June 21-23, 2013. This project aims to bring together scholarly contributions on the various endeavors in the Second World to conceive, build, and inhabit a socialist cityscape that was an alternative to the segregated spaces of capitalist cities and the atomized world of suburbia.

As a venue for opening a conversation about the new approaches to urbanity and planning, this project(http://secondworldurbanity.umwblogs.org/) goes beyond the
geographic boundaries of the Eastern Bloc and seeks transnational,
comparative, and global approaches to the study of the socialist city. We
propose to think of socialist urban planning from Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union to China and Cuba, as well as Vietnam, North Korea, and other countries with a state socialist past or present. We conceptualize such socialist urban planning as a distinct and multifaceted division of global urban planning trends. Just as the geographic scope is broad so, too, is our chronological reach, which will span the early post-World War II period through the collapse of state socialism and beyond to the present day.

Paper proposals are invited on a wide range of topics from (but not limited to) the history of professional networks and institutional organization, monumental projects, mass housing schemes, transfers of technologies and styles, the organization of public and private spaces, the political engagement of urban planning professionals, the treatment of gender, ethnic, and class differences in the socialist cityscape, the role of the state, the ideological premises of urban schemes and visionary projects, everyday life, urban residents’ (mis)uses of planned urban spaces. Papers from all disciplines in the social sciences and humanities will be considered. The organizers plan to publish an edited volume of selected conference papers.

Please send paper proposals (a 300-500 word abstract and a 1-page cv)
to swurbanity@gmail.com by February 1, 2013. Paper proposals will
be reviewed by the project’s organizers and program committee. We
will announce the papers that have been accepted on March 1, 2013.

The project is presently soliciting funds to cover some of the
transportation and/or housing costs of participants. We will know
whether such funds are available only in Spring 2013. Therefore,
interested participants should plan for covering costs through their
home institutions. The conference will not have a conference fee.

Program committee: Andres Kurg, Brigitte Le Normand, Daria
Bocharnikova, Kimberly Elman Zarecor, Marie Alice L’Heureux,
Steven Harris, and Vladimir Kulic.

The autonomist Marxist category of social labor and the city

The Italian workers’ rejection of rigid, authoritarian hierarchy, and impersonal, rationalized routines, and call for more flexible, cooperative social production forced capital into a paradigm shift. The industrial factory gave way to networked organization and production. The technological innovation of the personal computer, however, gave capital the means with which to extract surplus value, not from labor materialized in a product, but from labor based upon language. In other words, the new social laborer ushered in a new era of capitalist development known as post-Fordism and cognitive capitalism in which the very faculty of language is exploited for economic gain.

The theoretical basis for autonomist Marxism’s privileging of communication in contemporary configurations of capital is Karl Marx’s Grundrisse. In this text, the autonomist’s category of social labor in the form of Antonio Negri’s “socialized worker” (Books for Burning xl) and Maurizio Lazzarato’s “immaterial laborer” (“Immaterial Labor”) finds its precursor in Marx’s “social individual” who “steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor” (Grundrisse 705). Paolo Virno explains the quote’s importance for Marx:

This placing of labor activity ‘to the side’ of the immediate process of production indicates […] that labor corresponds more and more to ‘supervisory and regulatory activity’ (ibid., 709). In other words: the tasks of a worker or of a clerk no longer involve the completion of a single particular assignment, but the changing and intensifying of social cooperation. (62).

Production and its relationship to consumption have drastically changed. The goods being produced are no longer just material. The production of knowledge, technology, and advertising are just as important if not more so. The game-changer is that today an exchange of knowledge precedes an exchange of goods. Images and signs are sold before the product. Cognitive capitalism, as Lazzarato astutely observes, is obsessed, not with the production of the commodity, but with the creation of the “world where the commodity exists” (“Créer des mondes”). Virno describes the post-Fordist experience of cognitive capitalism as one in which the communication industry (he interchanges the term “communication industry” with “spectacle” and “culture industry”) “plays the role of industry of the means of production” (61). Machinery is no longer the primary productive force, but, rather, “linguistic-cognitive competencies inseparable from living labor” are (61).

What this means for the city is deindustrialization, the dependence on culture and technology to produce wealth, the sanitizing of public space, and the linking of art, urban planning, and politics.

Works cited

Lazzarato, Maurizio. “Immaterial Labor.” Trans. Paul Colilli and Ed Emory. Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics. Ed. Paul Virno and Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. 133-147. Print.

—. “Créer des mondes: Capitalisme contemporain et guerres ‘esthétiques’.” Multitudes 15 2004. Web. 14 Dec 2010. <<http://multitudes.samizdat.net/Creer-des-mondes-Capitalisme>>.

Marx, Karl. The Grundrisse. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Print.

Negri, Antonio. Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy. London: Verso, 2005. Print.

Virno, Paolo. A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext, 2004. Print.