Maurizio Lazzarato (1999) 'New Forms of Production and Circulation of Knowledge' in, Josephine Bosma, et al, eds., Readme! Filtered by Nettime. ASCII Culture and the Revenge of Knowledge. New York: Autonomedia.

Culture seems to have become integrated in the process of the creation of capital, with cultural regeneration as the clearest example of this tendency of capital's renewal. Art clearly follows economic imperatives for the most part. To Maurizio Lazzarato, culture has become subordinated to economics, and objections to this tend to be concentrated on the strategy of 'cultural exception' where the separation is enforced by intellectuals and artists, as well as some governments. Lazzarato sees this as an untenable position with regard to new modes of the production and circulation of knowledge. Instead he argues that the new modes of the production of knowledge and culture are not the same as the production of wealth, and therefore it is this that should influence the economy (1999: 159). 

Lazzarato quotes Gabriel Tarde who in 1902 theorised the production of culture, and knowledge in particular, in such a way as to reject the traditional analysis of the political economy. Rather than concentrating on use-value, he posited the idea of 'truth-value' in that knowledge is the result of a process of production. However, unlike other products, knowledge is a mode of production that cannot simply be reduced to the market or through exchange without distorting its production and consumption value (Lazzarato, 1999: 160). Capital tries to treat knowledge as it does any other goods or else suffer the consequences of the treat to property rights and the relations of production. In Lazzarato's terms, capital is obliged to turn 'immaterial products' into 'material products' to product its logic ('immaterial economy' is Lazzarato's term for the informational economy). His example is the production of books, and we might consider the production of this volume, the intellectual rights and its exchange value - license agreements of the creative commons come to mind, as does the use of freely downloadable PDFs from the internet. A book's exchange value can be determined by the market as a product but not as knowledge which is more determined by moral issues of gift or theft (Lazzarato, 1999: 162). Relations of power extend beyond the market in other words.  

A further example of this is provided in terms of pedagogy. Again, the production, communication and appropriation of knowledge can be seen to be different from that of wealth. Clearly changes in government policy appear to desperately want to subordinate knowledge to the economy with the introduction of 'top-up' fees in the UK as the most clear example of this tendency. The wide and free distribution of knowledge over the internet somewhat reverses this trend. Incidentally, the Lazzarato essay was first distributed over the nettime mail list in 1998, later published in paper form.  The significance of this for Lazzarato is that 'these qualities of intellectual production is in the process of becoming a new "contradiction" within the information economy, for which the challenges represented today by the internet are but the premises of opposition to come'. (1999: 163)

Therefore to call for the autonomy of culture misses the point for Lazzarato. If capital appropriates knowledge and culture for its purpose, then its opposition must be to use knowledge and culture to influence the economy. For Tarde, 'artistic labour is productive labour' (Lazzarato, 1999: 165) and holds the potential to influence labour in general. In this way, the economy might be influenced by culture and influence a change of operational logic.