Abstract
‘The art of living with ICTs (information and communication technologies)’ today not only means finding new ways to cope, interact and create new lifestyles on the basis of the new digital (network) technologies individually, as ‘consumer-citizens’. It also means inventing new modes of living, producing and, not in the least place, struggling collectively, as workers and producers. As the so-called digital revolution unfolds in the context of a neoliberal cognitive and consumerist capitalism, its ‘innovations’ are predominantly employed to modulate and control both production processes and consumer behavior in view of the overall goal of extracting surplus value. Today, the digital networks overwhelmingly destroy social autonomy, instead engendering increasing social heteronomy and proletarianization. Yet it is these very networks themselves, as technical pharmaka in the sense of French ‘technophilosopher’ Bernard Stiegler, that can be employed as no other to struggle against this tendency. This paper briefly explores this possibility by reflecting upon current diagnoses of our ‘technological situation’ by some exemplary post-operaist Marxists from a Stieglerian, pharmacological perspective.
Highlights
This paper briefly looks at the impact of the new digital network technologies (DNTs) on today’s workers, consumers and citizens ‘living’ with these technologies within the context of today’s cognitive and consumerist capitalism, diagnosing it as predominantly
I will use Bernard Stiegler’s pharmacological conception of technology and see how it can be used to elaborate and enrich the analyses of today’s general intellect by the operaist-autonomist tradition, which always revolve around the issue of recomposition or the empowerment of the general intellect as a process of collective political subjectivation of workers/citizens
In the context of cognitive capitalism, and as a result of the deployment of DNTs, the human cognitive apparatus is increasingly incorporated into the digital cognosphere
Summary
This paper briefly looks at the impact of the new digital network technologies (DNTs) on today’s workers, consumers and citizens ‘living’ with these technologies within the context of today’s cognitive and consumerist capitalism, diagnosing it as predominantly. It explores how these technologies can foster the empowerment of what is called the ‘general intellect’ in the Italian post-Marxist movement of post-autonomism or post-operaism, one of the most vital movements of Marxist thought in recent times This tradition of thinkers, whose ranks include Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarato and Franco Berardi, is explicitly concerned, among other things, with studying the shifting relationships between technological change on the one side and the class struggle of workers against capital and vice versa on the other, what is generally absent in their analyses is an explicit account of technology and the various ways it mediates, constitutes and conditions social relationships and relations to the self. Given the exploratory nature of this paper, I will only provide some suggestions in that direction
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