from
some interview:
"the separation of our lives and the public and private and the
splitting of ourselves in the public and the private, is something that drains
our power in a way. It delimits what we consider political and therefore what we
can change collectively in our lives. The reason, at least I understand it from
the us-feminist movements of the 70s especially, for that we consider the
personal political, is because we want to say that these are relations that are
social and open for collective transformation. If they are considered private,
what it seems to me that designation does is to limit the collective political
activity we can exert over them. In other words for me then, what the potential
for liberation is that it opens up for political action; it opens up as a
political issue and therefore as an object of our political activity. We don't
in a way limit our scope of our politics. In other words, sexual relationships,
relationships of intimacy, relationships between men and women, between men and
men, between women and women - all of these are political and social
relationships."
"we're not particularly original with this thesis that the dominant
paradigm of work is no longer the factory in the dominant countries. That's a
fact which is more or less obvious to everyone. This doesn't mean, of course,
that factory production no longer exists - it still exists in the dominant
countries, it still exists in subordinated countries. What it means though, we
have to reconceive what production means and what forms of labor are. One of our
efforts has been to reconceptualize what's mean by labor, in a way broaden what
the concept covers. There are two sources of inspiration or knowledge for this.
One is, especially US or anglo feminist theory >from the 70s, trying to rethink
questions of reproduction starting from domestic labor and thinking of how to
conceive forms of labor that are not included in the wage system. one of the
positive aspects of their efforts was broadening what is recognized as labor or
production. The other is Deleuze/Guaratti and various theorists around them
trying to think of explaining the concept of production for instance in their
discussion of desiring production. It's another way of broaden the notion of
labor and production."
"end of the distinction
between production and reproduction. It was not quite conceived as such but it
was at least for me put on the agenda by US socialist feminist theory in the 70s
because precisely that distinction between production and reproduction was used
as a political weapon in a way against the kinds of work that was coded as
reproductive. Anyway,, the ways in which the dominant forms of production have
changed allow us today to recognize that perhaps never was this distinction
sustainable. That's the way we're trying to think it now. This is also in a way
the content of our notion of biopolitical production. It's not production of
goods, or even goods and services but ultimately production of society itself.
Production of subjectivities is also, and even fundamentally, what is going on.
This requires an explanation of what we mean by immaterial labor. In the way we
like to characterize the shift in global capitalist economy, beginning maybe
from the 1970s - it's always difficult to date these things - is that there is
now a hegemony of what we call immaterial labor. This doesn't mean of course
that all labor is immaterial neither does it mean that the labor itself is
immaterial. The term is supposed to grasp that the product of labor is
immaterial in some sense meaning that in contrast, for instance, to the labor
that produces a good such as a car or a television, this is labor that produces
either knowledge or an affect. And these things are in that sense immaterial.
Affect of production is an excellent example because obviously affect is all
about the body. We're not merely talking about something incorporeal - it's
eminently corporeal but the product is something immaterial. In this respect,
because this kind of labor has achieved a hegemonic position in the economy
meaning that it has the position of the highest productional value, it makes
clear the unsustainability of such previous distinctions. The two most
challenging ones are, like I said before, the distinction between production and
reproduction which from the perspective of immaterial labor makes less and less
sense; and the other is the distinction between labor time and the time of life.
I mean, one is never not working if one considers production itself as the
production of subjectivities."
"when you take the variety of kinds of paid labor that
involve affective labor, think of it from health care workers which are in a
variety of scales: of course health care workers they're actually doing material
work, too; but they also produce affect [...] nother example would be flight
attendants who are also doing some sort of material work although a large part
of their work is a production of affect. Once we start thinking of the
production of affect, for me it's easy to move from that to production of
subjectivity. What's important about this, too, is we recognize the production
of subjectivity not as the metaphysical instance in the sense of it being done
prior to us. Once we realize our active involvement in the production of our
collective subjectivities then we can take the power of changing it and on
acting on it. It seems to me in this sense at least that the production of
subjectivity is a very "everyday act"."
"nother example would be flight
attendants who are also doing some sort of material work although a large part
of their work is a production of affect. Once we start thinking of the
production of affect, for me it's easy to move from that to production of
subjectivity. What's important about this, too, is we recognize the production
of subjectivity not as the metaphysical instance in the sense of it being done
prior to us. Once we realize our active involvement in the production of our
collective subjectivities then we can take the power of changing it and on
acting on it. It seems to me in this sense at least that the production of
subjectivity is a very "everyday act".
"in previous periods, it could have seemed that production
of goods was the object of capitalist production whereas increasingly now the
biopolitical dimension is recognized more prominently."
"One of the things that's so useful about the term subversion is the
recognition of our already being implicated in forms of power. Subversion only
happens from the inside. Sabotage too. You can start from Judith Buttler's
notion of subversion in a sense of reperforming the norm but differently. So
we're always already implicated in a certain performance of a normalizing social
space but if we introduce difference into it, that's in a way a subversion of
the norm."
from
Common Property
" We developed our conception of affective labor from a series of studies by socialist feminists, mostly written in the 1980s, that tried to understand what has traditionally been designated as women‘s work with concepts like labor in the bodily mode, caring labor, kin work, and maternal work. One aspect common to these various studies was the effort to undo the conventional mind / body division – and particularly its correlate in the field of labor, intellectual versus manual – because it was an obstacle to accounting for what „women‘s work“ actually consists of. The concept of affective labor and immaterial labor as a whole thus is intended as an extension of this project to think labor outside the mind / body division. [...]n addition to challenging the mind body division, these and other socialist feminist studies of women‘s work also intended to challenge the economic division between production and reproduction. This project too is intrinsic to the concept of immaterial labor. In the context of communication and even more so in the context of the production of affects, the distinction between production and reproduction breaks down completely, because what is involved here is the production of social relationships and at the most general level the production of social life itself. These products are not objects that are created once and for all, but rather they are produced and reproduced in a constant stream of activity. The production and reproduction of social life – biopolitical production, the continuous production of the life of the polis – is from this perspective the most general activity and the highest scope of labor."
"Aren‘t we distorting traditional communal activities by forcing them into the category of labor? My response to such objections is that indeed none of these activities are intrinsically labor – and in fact no activity is. The definition of labor is the object of struggles and what counts as labor today is the result of previous struggles. Capital seeks to define labor as any activity that directly produces economic value. Labor, from this perspective, must be read backwards in the production process: labor is what produces capital and all those activities that do not produce capital are not labor. It is important from the standpoint of capital, as I said before, that certain activities are coded as labor because labor is necessary to ground the right of property"
"Here, I should note, we encounter another meaning of the term biopolitical production: all life activity is potentially today coded as labor and thus all of life is potentially under the control of capital. In fact, the progression toward all life activity becoming labor is advancing hand in hand with that toward all elements of life becoming private property. This might be called too the real subsumption of life under capital."
"immaterial labor, and especially its affective component, challenges the traditional divisions between mind and body, posing instead a continuous interchange between the intellectual and the corporeal. This is where one should develop a theory of the productive flesh, since flesh is the name for that matter that is at once and indistinctly both intellectual and corporeal, subjective and objective. This is a flesh that produces and creates. In the second place, in the realm of biopolitical production, our practices, our performances, and our labor are constantly constituting all aspect of social life: norms, relationships, institutions, and so forth. Not only sex but all of life is produced and producible – and this is where one should develop a notion of monstrosity because the infinite producibility, transformability, mutability of life is the stuff of monsters, beautiful monsters and horrible monsters too. [...] The scene of biopolitical production is a stage on which the struggle for liberation has to be played out."
"This new realm of production and this new producibility of life is reflected in the new forms of property that are emerging today. Corresponding to the newly central role of immaterial labor is a similarly central role of immaterial forms of property. This correspondence is no coincidence, I will argue, because the capitalist legitimation of private property has always been grounded on labor such that a shift in the forms of labor makes possible and necessary new forms of property. In particular, biopolitical production makes it possible that life itself can become private property."
" My question, in other words, is not really can the security of the private immaterial property be defended against illegal threats – and indeed I assume that despite significant difficulties it can – but rather can the legitimacy of the private ownership of immaterial products be maintained? Force is secondary in the establishment and maintenance of capitalist relations of property; the logic of legitimation is its primary support."
"arguments of social utility are very persuasive and carry great political value, but they too have little power within the capitalist legal framework. U.S. patent law does in fact state that „the promotion and progress of science and the useful arts is the main object of the patent system, and reward of inventors is secondary and merely a means to that end,“ but that does not mean that patents will be decided on that basis. Neither patents nor copyrights are awarded or denied on the basis of arguments of promoting the progress of science or social utility."
"The knowledges that neem seeds can function as a safe pesticide and that turmeric as a healing agent were produced by hosts of agents that form a chain stretching over a long historical period. To credit as inventor the final individual to enter into this chain would be a great distortion of the process that produced the knowledge. Alternatively, apportioning accurate relative contributions to all the individuals involved would require an impossible calculation. In other words, legitimate property rights must involve an adequate representation of the production process but that representation here is thrown into crisis."
"I do not think that this calculation difficulty and representation crisis of the labor logic of property is isolated to the knowledge production of traditional communities. I think rather that it is a general condition that affects all immaterial labor. First of all, in the realm of science this individual labor logic is based on a false representation of scientific practice. Scientific ideas are produced collaboratively, not only within each laboratory but in the scientific community at large. Think of attacking a scientific problem like adding weights that accumulated in a pile on one side of a scale. The work of each scientist adds a small weight and at some point the balance will tip. Crediting the solution to the individual who added the final piece is a very inadequate representation of the process as a whole. The only accurate representation would be that all the scientists who worked on it produced the solution collectively."
" The same is true for the production of ideas, knowledges, and information in general. No one thinks alone; rather we all participate in a general social intellect. Consider, for example, the hypothetical case of an idea for an advertisement with a hip-hop musical theme. Imagine that the ad employee got the musical idea from a band he or she heard the night before and that band in turn developed its music out of a street vernacular. Who produced the idea? The individual attribution of ideas smacks of a false notion of genius. Originality is highly overrated. Thought is really produced socially, collectively. Finally, I would argue that all forms of immaterial labor are necessarily collective and social. Communication is an immediately cooperative, relational mode of activity. The production of affects too works through what is common."
