HOW TO DO THINGS BY THEORY

PUBLIC EDITING SESSION #2:

for joined issue of TkH Journal and le Journal de Laboratoires: Materialist approaches to immaterial labour /(in) performance – Re-materializing immaterial labor

Notes

Participants:

Guest: Florian Schneider – film maker, media activist, writer and curator based in Brussels,

Editorial collective: Bojana Cvejić, Bojan Djordjev, Marta Popivoda, Ana Vujanović (TkH), Virginie Bobin, Alice Chauchat, Nataša Petrešin Bachelez (Les laboratoires d’Aubervilliers), and audience

The second session of Public Editng of joined issue of TkH Journal for Performing Arts Practice and Le journal des Laboratoires on re-materialising immaterial labour in performing arts aimed to move beyond mapping the field of problematics (that has been done on the first session), and was primarily orientated toward identifying examples of artistic practices that tackle in a critical and pro-active way the problematic of immaterial labour as a mode of production in the performing arts field.

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TkH – Walking Theory et les Laboratoires invitent Maurizio Lazzarato à participer à la troisième séance de rédaction publique d’un journal conjoint portant sur le travail immatériel.
Nous serions très heureux de vous y voir. Il n’est pas nécessaire d’avoir assisté aux deux premières sessions pour se joindre au groupe.

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19h30 – 19h45 : introduction aux problématiques de la session (Bojana Cvejic et Ana Vujanovic)
19h45 – 20h15 : intervention de Maurizio Lazzarato, sociologue et philosophe
20h15 – 20h45 : intervention de Judith Ickowicz, docteur en droit privé
20h45 – 21h : questions, discussion
21h – 21h30 : discussion sur les propositions de contributions, entre autres, de Marko Kostanić et Dušan Grlja
21h30 – 22h : chaque participant est invité à présenter en quelques minutes un projet culturel et/ou artistique qu’il/elle estime exemplaire pour les pratiques de “production immatérielle”

Avec: Bojana Cvejic, Bojan Djordjev et Ana Vujanovic (TkH), ainsi que Virginie Bobin, Grégory Castéra et Natsa Petresin-Bachelez, (les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers)

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Tous les textes de références pour cette troisième et dernière session:
Maurizio Lazzarato LE RENOUVELLEMENT DU CONCEPT DE PRODUCTION ET SES SÉMIOTIQUES
Maurizio Lazzarato IMMATERIAL LABOUR
Akseli Virtanen ARBITRARY POWER
Judith Ickowitz LE DROIT FACE À LA DÉMATÉRIALISATION DE L’ŒUVRE D’ART UNE ANALYSE JURIDIQUE DE L’ART CONTEMPORAIN

Plus d’infos sur le projet “PUBLIC EDITING”: http://www.leslaboratoires.org/content/view/575/lang,fr/

PUBLIC EDITING #3 reference text_1:

LE RENOUVELLEMENT DU CONCEPT DE PRODUCTION ET SES SÉMIOTIQUES (Chapitre 1)

Maurizio Lazzarato

« De deux définitions de la fabrique données par Ure, et citées par Marx, la première rapporte les machines aux hommes qui les surveillent, la seconde les machines et les hommes, « organes mécaniques et intellectuels, à la fabrique comme corps plein qui les machines. Or c’est la seconde définition qui est littérale et concrète »

Deleuze et Guattari

Dans ce premier chapitre nous allons donner un aperçu général de l’implication de la subjectivité dans le capitalisme contemporain. Elle est investie et exploitée par ce que Deleuze et Guattari appellent l’assujettissement social et l’asservissement machinique.

L’assujettissement social produit et distribue des rôles et des places, en nous équipant d’une subjectivité  et  nous assignant à une identité, à un sexe, à une profession, à une nationalité etc., de façon que tout le monde est pris dans un piège sémiotique signifiant et représentatif.

La forme paradigmatique que l’assujettissement social revêt dans le capitalisme néolibéral est celle qui  incite le salarié, le chômeur, le travailleur pauvre, le consommateur, à devenir sujet, à se reconnaître comme producteur ou usager actif et responsable. Le sujet dans le capitalisme contemporain est identifié à l’autonomie, à la capacité d’agir, de décider et de choisir de l’entrepreneur. Dans tous les domaines, qu’il s’agisse de production, de formation, de consommation, de communication, nous sommes enjoint, à nous comporter comme un « entrepreneur de soi » (selon la formule de Foucault). La micro – entreprise, l’auto – entrepreneur, le capital humain célèbrent le mariage de l’individualisme économique et politique.

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PUBLIC EDITING #3 reference text_2:

IMMATERIAL LABOUR

Maurizio Lazzarato

text from 1996, published on

http://www.generation-online.org/c/fcimmateriallabour3.htm

‘If production today is directly the production of a social relation, then the ‘raw material’ of immaterial labour is subjectivity and the ‘ideological’ environment in which subjectivity lives and reproduces. The production of subjectivity ceases to be only an instrument of social control (for the production of mercantile relationships) and becomes directly productive, because the goal of our post industrial society is to construct the consumer/communicator – and to construct it as ‘active’. Immaterial workers (those who work in advertising, fashion, marketing, television, cybernetics, and so forth) satisfy a demand by the consumer and at the same time establish that demand.’ (M. Lazzarato)

A significant amount of empirical research has been conducted concerning the new forms of the organization of work. This, combined with a corresponding wealth of theoretical reflection, has made possible the identification of a new conception of what work is nowadays and what new power relations it implies.

An initial synthesis of these results—framed in terms of an attempt to define the technical and subjective-political composition of the working class—can be expressed in the concept of immaterial labor, which is defined as the labor that produces the informational and cultural concent of the commodity. The concept of immaterial labor refers to two different aspects of labor. On the one hand, as regards the “informational content” of the commodity, it refers directly to the changes taking place in workers’ labor processes in big companies in the industrial and tertiary sectors, where the skills involved in direct labor are increasingly skills involving cybernetics and computer control (and horizontal and vertical communication). On che other hand, as regards the activity that produces the “cultural content” of the commodity, immaterial labor involves a series of activities that are not normally recognized as “work”—in other words, the kinds of activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and, more strategically, public opinion. Once the privileged domain of the bourgeoisie and its children, these activities have since the end of the 1970s become the domain of what we have come to define as “mass intellectuality.” The profound changes in these strategic sectors have radically modified not only the composition, management, and regulation of the workforce—the organization of production—but also, and more deeply, the role and function of intellectuals and their activities within society.

The “great transformation” that began at the start of the 1970s has changed the very terms in which the question is posed. Manual labor is increasingly coming to involve procedures that could be defined as “intellectual,” and the new communications technologies increasingly require subjectivities that are rich in knowledge. It is not simply that intellectual labor has become subjected to the norms of capitalist production. What has happened is that a new “mass intellectuality” has come into being, created out of a combination of the demands of capitalist production and the forms of “self-valorization” that the struggle against work has produced. The old dichotomy between “mental and manual labor,” or between “material labor and immaterial labor,” risks failing to grasp the new nature of productive activity, which takes this separation on board and transforms it. The split between conception and execution, between labor and creativity, between author and audience, is simultaneously transcended within the “labor process” and reimposed as political command within the “process of valorization.”

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PUBLIC EDITING #3 reference text_3:

ARBITRARY POWER

Or, on Organization without Ends

Akseli Virtanen (version June, 2005)

This text has only one motif: it tries to think what we can at the moment when the species-being of human beings which is without any function and always open to change is tried to be appropriated and subordinated to the service of a particular historical period and its tasks.

To say “I can” does not refer to any unfailing or particular capacity, but it is in case very demanding. “I can” does not mean any particular ability and it is still perhaps the most severe and cruel experience possible: the experience of potentiality.

This experience is the experience at the moment when the generic human capacities – intellect, perception and linguistic-relational abilities – which make human beings ‘humans’ and do not exist for any particular reasons enter to our immediate experience. This is the meaning of the concept multitude: it is the form of being human in which the ontological condition enters to economy and politics (our immediate experience). For the first time it is possible to experience what it means to be a human being “as such”. We can look directly to the eye our existence as potential beings which do not have any particular surrounding, any particular task or function, that is, as beings which can do anything and from which anything may be expected. We experience at the same time the abundance of our possibilities and the arbitrariness of all reasons and constraints. This experience makes us restless, it makes us bored and it makes us homeless. But it makes us also strong.

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