Lecture at DOCH, Stockholm
8 June 2011, hr 18:00 – 21:00 [website]
The common has no outside: Coreography of the new subjectivities of labour orchestrated by cognitive capitalism and financial crisis.
Matteo Pasquinelli
Abstract. In the last decade we became familiar with a new political grammar which attempted to upgrade our imagination to the modes of production of contemporary capitalism: see the notions of immaterial labour and cognitariat, precariat and multitude, and so on. Indeed the political language has been populated recently by a bestiary of new subjectivities. But then also the idea of the ‘common’ should be framed as a conflictive battleground and dirty intersections of productive bodies and machines rather then as an space of abstract equality. When we talk about the common, we should focus on two questions: Who’s is producing the common? And then: Who’s capturing the common? In this lecture, the very intestine and intimate struggle between capital and labour is traced back to the Marxian notion of ‘organic composition of capital’. Organic refers here to the ‘organism’ constituted by the innervation of muscular energy and industrial apparatuses, collective knowledge and cybernetic machines, migrant multitudes and megapolises. Through the history of this formula, the fatal relation between knowledge accumulation and financial crisis will be exposed.
