Maurizio Lazzarato (1996) 'Immaterial Labour', trans. Paul Colilli & Ed Emory, in Paolo Virno & Michael Hardt, eds., _Radical Thought in Italy_, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 132-146.


The importance of the investigation into new forms of the organisation of work lie in the power relations this implies. 'Immaterial labour' is defined in this context as the labour that 'produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity' (1996: 132). It therefore refers to the labour processes that involve cybernetics and computer control as well as cultural activities often not considered in terms of work including artistic work (as a result of what Lazzarato calls 'mass intellectuality').  This shift is in recognition that since the 1970s, manual labour involves intellectual work and knowledge such as that involves in operating computer systems. To Lazzarato, the significance of this cuts across classical class distinctions, and undermines the old dichotomy between manual and intellectual work - or between material and immaterial labour - and transforms it:
'The split between conception and execution, between labour and creativity, between author and audience, is simultaneously transcended within the "labour process" and reimposed as political command with the "process of valorization".' (1996: 133)

Thus new conflicts arise from this organisation of work that expresses new forms of control and command over subjectivity. Lazzarato stresses this point: 'participative management is a technology of power, a technology for creating and controlling the "subjective processes"' (1996: 134). The imposition of command in this way through facilitation rather than order, and the ensuing 'violence' takes on a 'normative communicative form' in this way (1996: 135). This critique would allow for a more considered address of the open source movement for instance. The central issue is whether power is redistributed under such conditions - the capitalist recognises the increased autonomy of labour but at the same time attempts to limit the redistribution of power that arises from new collective forms 

The production of software is an explicit example of so-called 'immaterial production' and is a good case study for the ways in which manual and intellectual labour are entwined - combined technical and creative skills. This is often described as independent work of 'self-employed', 'freelance', and is characterised by 'precariousness, hyperexploitation, mobility' in which leisure time becomes indistinguishable from work time, and 'life becomes inseparable from work' (1996: 137). In this way, it also disrupts the relationship between production and consumption:
'The role of immaterial labor is to promote continual innovation in the forms and conditions of communication (and thus in work and consumption). It gives form to and materializes needs, the imaginary, consumer tastes, and so forth, and these products in turn become powerful producers of needs, images, and tastes.' (1996: 137)

It tales on an ideological function in other words in producing not only commodities but the capital relation - immmaterial workers 'satisfy a demand by the consumer and at the same time establish that demand' (1996: 142) thus breaking down the distinction between supply and demand.

Lazzarato stresses that immaterial labour takes as its starting point a social labour power that is relatively autonomous that industry is required to adapt for its purpose. He draws upon systems theory in this respect to describe the new forms of organisation and regulation. The concept of immaterial labour extends this thinking to begin to describe a space for a radical autonomy. Lazzarato sees this a a break in the continuity of production that breaks away from the centrality of waged labour:
'A polymorphous self-employed autonomous work has emerged as the dominant form, a kind of "intellectual worker" who is him- or herself an entrepreneur, inserted within a market that is constantly shifting and within networks that are changeable in time and space.' (1996 139)

'The "author" must lose its individual dimension and be transformed into an industrially organized production process' (1996: 143). The concept of immaterial labour casts creativity not in terms of 'individuality' or 'superiority' but in rather different terms. Lazzarato draws upon the work Simmel and Bakhtin to elaborate on a view of social creativity seeing Simmel's views bound up with class division. On the contrary, whereas Bakhtin 'defines immaterial labour as the superceding of the division between "material labor and intellectual labor" and demonstrates how creativity is a social process' (1996: 146). Software art would make a good case study of such a process of immaterial production. 

     



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(these notes below are done)

Maurizio Lazzarato in his essay 'General Intellect: Towards an Inquiry into immaterial Labour' (trans. In progress, Ed Emery, http://www.emery.archive.mcmail.com/public_html/immaterial/lazzarat.html) 

Lazzarato examines some of the new forms of labour and new relations of production. Immaterial labour as he calls it, constitutes itself in forms that are collective, and , in terms of the network and flows - no longer just confined by the walls of the factory.  It is, thus, a 'mutation of "living labour"' (Lazzarato) and a certain restructuring of the relationship between production and consumption. Immaterial labour transforms the forms and conditions of communication and in turn consumption, making commodities like images, tastes, needs material. Industry and capital is not particularly in control of these processes but recuperates it for profit. To understand this process, it is generally agreed that you need to combine neoclassical economic analyses with systems theory. Whether this is a new historical phase of capitalism and its processes of accumulation is the issue, perhaps? 

The market is transformed, mobile and networked, and the worker is both tied to old forms of waged labour as well as autonomous from it at times.


Note: allegedly 'immateriality' takes form in the postmodern writings of Lyotard (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 168)

In 'A Means of Mutation' that charts the development of I/O/D's alternative browser 'webstalker', Matt Fuller describes the situation in the dot.com boom where web designers seemed to have a direct link to the 'creative economy'. This is entirely in keeping with the social and communicative nature of labour in the digital economy; what Maurizio Lazzarato calls 'immaterial labour' that produces 'first and foremost a social relation... [that] produces not only commodities, but also the capital relation' (in Fuller, 2003: 54). Fuller cites Lazzarato again to assert that this practice is founded on the raw material of subjectivity, and states: 'This subjectivity is an ensemble of pre-formatted, automated, contingent, and "live" actions, schemas, and decisions performed by software, languages, and designers. This subjectivity is also productive of further sequences of seeing, knowing, and doing.' (2003: 54)