Immaterial Production Research Articles

Nothing to Say but the Unsayable: How Locke’s Linguistic Functionalism Turned into Leopardi’s Analogical Language

Abstract This article explores the so-far uncharted filiation of Leopardi’s understanding of language from Locke’s linguistic theory outlined in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. In following Kristeva’s belief that language theories are predicated upon theories of the subject and Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the communicative power of the body, the article looks at the reverberations that Leopardi’s teoria del piacere (understood as an anthropological system) exerts on his theory of language and builds a neck-to-neck comparison with Locke’s linguistic functionalism. In underlining Locke’s important role for Leopardi’s theory of language, this work shows how the latter distances himself from the functionalism of Locke’s Essay by theorizing a language built on semantic vagueness and indefiniteness. This language is based on the epistemological conviction that ideas do not exist as immaterial products of the mind but rather are always incarnate in the physicality of language. In defining this kind of language as analogical, the article argues that for Leopardi the linguistic act takes the shape of a bodily gesture: language, then, is not just the concrete translation of a mental process but the movement of an embodied mind. In this sense, rather than expressing the mathematical coincidence of signifier and signified of a langue des calculs, Leopardi’s language voices the leftovers of expression, the semantic excess that Locke’s functionalism generally considers to be an error of an unsuccessful communicative act.

Urban military geographies: New directions in the (re)production of space, militarism, and the urban

AbstractArmed forces in urban areas are a very visible source of socio‐spatial and urban change. Even in contemporary cities ‘at peace’, this presence and ensuing changes can be wide‐ranging, evident across infrastructure, organisations, narratives of place, events, and everyday activities. Although over the past 2 decades critical military studies and urban geopolitics have explored some of these themes, an urban studies perspective on such military geographies in peacetime has elicited far less attention. The aim of this article is to open up opportunities for deeper conceptualisation and research on urban military geographies. This article establishes a dialogue between critical military studies and urban geopolitics, to review the different dimensions of the influence of a military presence in urban space, and to provide a synthesis of these two bodies of literature. Using Lefebvre's dialectical theory of spatial production, this review shows how cities can be privileged spaces for the reproduction of militarism and preparation for war. Moreover, it examines how the presence of military forces in peacetime can influence the material and immaterial production of urban space.

Problematic Aspects of the Classification of Forensic Economic Examination

The theoretical-methodological foundations of the development of forensic economic examination regarding the determination of classification features of its species composition have not only theoretical-methodological, but also direct practical significance in the activities of expert economists, as well as judicial investigative bodies in the event that the latter appoint this type of examinations. This research paper’s purpose is to study the criteria for the classification of forensic economic examinations, established by soviet scientific thought, aimed at improving the systematization of their species composition. Using the techniques of analysis, synthesis, induction, deduction and generalization, it was determined that the emergence of new types and sorts of forensic economic examinations depends on factors that can be combined into two groups: 1) socio-economic relations — a change of their format; 2) judicial and investigative practice —emergence of new objects of research and tasks; 3) economic offenses — new ways, techniques of committing economic crimes. It has been established that the structural differentiation of this type of forensic examinations is due to the procedural needs of the judicial and investigative practice. It has been found that the criterion for systematization of the species composition of forensic examinations belongs to the economic plane, namely to the distribution of social production into the spheres of material and immaterial production. The next stage of the distribution of economic examinations is to the relevant industries according to certain types of activity with the definition of the main criterion of classification — according to the type of production activity. Thanks to this, compliance with the set of requirements for the scientifically based selection of classification criteria with the distinction of sorts and types of economic examinations is ensured.

THE POLITICAL ONTOLOGY OF MICHAEL HARDT AND ANTONIO NEGRI

The works titled Empire and Multitude that were co-authored by political theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have created a considerable impact on human and social sciences. In these studies, the writers examine the main characteristics of the passage from modernity to postmodernity, industrial production to postindustrial immaterial production, modern notion of sovereignty to the global regime that they call Empire. Moreover, they maintain that the political agents that were active in modernity should be reconsidered within the context of a new postmodern political subjectivity which they call “the multitude.” This article argues that Hardt and Negri’s political theory cannot be grasped only with an empirical approach, it must also be read from the perspective of political ontology. Underlying this claim is the fact that Hardt and Negri depart from the dominant political theories and critical methods of modernity, and that they take Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Spinozian ontology to the center of their analysis. Accordingly, this article discusses the sources—primarily the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari—that feed into concepts such as Empire, the multitude, desire, and immaterial labor introduced by Hardt and Negri, and it investigates the political ontology that constitutes the framework of their work.

Juridical Ontologies of Production and the Ricardian Machine

Abstract This article uses doctrinal analysis of UK tax law to address the question in political economy of where the ‘production boundary’ around value creation lies. It concludes that the ‘classical’ production boundary around material production may be encountered as an emergent feature of forensic investigations of the ontology of surplus in real world commercial contexts. This is particularly important for political economists of the global production network because of the contrasting structural phenomenon whereby value is predominantly added in immaterial production processes.

Determination of Factors Affecting the Strategic Sustainability of the Enterprise

By itself, the presence of identified factors of strategic stability is not enough to ensure it. Obtaining a competitive advantage depends on how effectively they are used in the practical activities of the enterprise. Functioning in the market system of the economy, every enterprise must quickly respond to any information and changes occurring in the life of the country. Hardly any production in our country during the transition to the market economic system did without fundamental changes in all management systems. The management scheme, which worked successfully under conditions of centralized planning, could not ensure the stable operation of enterprises in market conditions. And that is why the management structure, designed to meet new marketing principles, has undergone many changes. The need to increase the efficiency of production, its intensification, set before the enterprises the task of further improvement of management activities. In modern conditions, competition is intensifying, as a result of which enterprise managers are constantly searching for new (adequate to the conditions of competition) enterprise management tools and levers for increasing their strategic stability. Among the main opportunities for increasing the strategic sustainability of this business element, we can highlight: building a development strategy, creating intangible assets, growth based on competencies, knowledge, technologies, and business processes. The market allows full manifestation of economic independence, therefore it is our fourth element of modern business. We consider the possibilities of using the market situation from the types of markets (growing, unchanged, stagnant, underdeveloped): survival based on strategic stability in the conditions of “consumer” competition and producer competition. Despite the importance of all groups of opportunities, a special role at the stage of business development should be attributed to the group of opportunities for strengthening strategic stability with the help of internal resources of the enterprise. This fact is explained by the fact that in today’s rapidly changing technological world, the survival of an enterprise largely depends on the quality of its labor resources (personnel), possession of accurate and timely information, created by the infrastructure of business and scientific and technical ideas and material forms of their implementation, that is, the unity of material and immaterial production.

Bilinguals and emotive expressiveness: immaterial potentialities and language production

Bilinguals and emotive expressiveness: immaterial potentialities and language production

BIOPODER E RESISTÊNCIA NA ORGANIZAÇÃO DA COPA DO MUNDO FIFA 2014

The 2014 World Cup was anchored in the promise of benefits for Brazil, in which FIFA and the Brazilian government demonstrated efforts towards obtaining popular acceptance. Thus, the study aimed to analyze how the immaterial production 2014 World Cup 2014 can be characterized based on the both organizers and the Brazilian society discourses. The research was conducted through a Foucauldian Discourse Analysis from a corpus representative of the two discursive positions investigated, having the political theory of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri as a theoretical lens.The findings point to two discursive formations, referring to the promise that the World Cup is good for Brazil and to the understanding that it did very costly for the country. The conclusion of the study is that the 2014 World Cup can be characterized by the exercise of and resistant to biopower.

Дисциплинарная и биополитическая власть как практики управления трудом в современных российских компаниях сектора нематериального производства

Дисциплинарная и биополитическая власть как практики управления трудом в современных российских компаниях сектора нематериального производства

NIGERIA’S CULTURAL POLICY AND THE NEEDS OF THE PERFORMING ARTS

Nigeria is a country reputed for its rich and diverse cultures from the multi-ethnic nationalities that make it up. Indeed, the diversity of traditions and cultures are evidenced in the nation’s more than four hundred and seventy (470) tribes. It is in the bid to ensure that each cultural entity is preserved, projected and promoted, that Nigeria has a cultural policy. The cultural policy is decidedly synonymous with the arts and artists since the arts and artists mainly generate the bulk of what materially, at least, constitutes culture. Of course, culture is derived from material and immaterial products all which are products of the creative ingenuities of artists. It is in line with this reasoning that this paper is written, to determine to what extent the Nigerian Cultural Policy has attended to the needs of the arts and artists, with particular emphasis on the performing arts. The performing arts in every culture make up the major part of such Culture’s creative and entertainment industry hence this paper is embarked upon to determine to what extent the policy has accommodated the needs of the performing arts. This is done through a detailed analytical assessment of the cultural policy. Recommendations are then made based on the conclusions drawn from the analysis.

Capital’s Artificial Intellect Becoming Uber’s Means of Autonomous Immaterial Production

Abstract The global path of capitalist development is continuously transformed as a result of the production and integration of advanced information and communication technologies (ICTs) within various forms of production. The first half of this paper conceptualises ICTs as capital’s appropriation and objectification of the productive forces of the general intellect in ‘the general artificial intellect’, a category that refers to the total processing power of networked ICTs in global society. The second half of the paper analyses Uber’s development of the elements of capital’s artificial intellect as the cybernetic means of real subsumption in its immaterial production process. The paper concludes that Uber’s development of autonomous vehicles is an example of the global trend in transport automation that could raise the organic composition of capital of the transport industry, which I suggest would advance the stage of real subsumption toward a third and final stage of autonomous subsumption.

The urban creative factory-creative ecosystems and (im)material design practices

Post-Fordism, with its evolution towards immaterial production in the areas of information, knowledge and affective, creative commerce, foregrounds design as a central, enabling activity. If this enablement finds particular application in cities of the Global North, it testifies to a shift in the geopolitical distribution of productive agency and application of international labour, one that sees industrial activities ‘reassigned’ to the Global South, leaving cities of the variably de-industrialised countries to develop cultural, symbolic, and creative economies.
 This paper examines the nature of urban place and the work regimes practised there consequent to these economies. It argues firstly for ‘cityness’ in these context to be understood as a creative urban factory – a place where older managerial and organisational techniques applied to factory environments in the service of high productivity are recalibrated and diffused across the entirety of urban territories. Secondly, the paper links the productivity of the creative urban factory with a biopolitical makeover of cities themselves, seeing in an optimisation of productive capacity a situation where the entirety of living labour is taken up and commoditised via the production of ever-customised lifestyles and identities. A raft of new identifying subject and worker categories emerge that exceed or elude the older class identifications, and with it, a certain potential to collectively counter the exploitation inherent post-Fordist work. While exploring the possibility of new identifying collectives – what Hardt and Negri have referred to as the multitude – the paper makes an argument for design itself to be a key medium for rethinking and re-enacting collective agency.
 As the harbinger of new forms of user participation and co-operative processes that are, by way of emerging technological tools, open, evolving, ad hoc, reflexive and customisable, design practice increasingly must contend and adapt to forms of de-professionalisation. Rather than seeing in this adaption a demise in profession position, the new possibilities appearing in design point to a low-tech, yet digitally-driven enabled, re-politicisation of design and creativity, one better able to contend with the strictures of the urban creative factory.

Reification and immaterial production

Reification, a central theme in radical social/political theory from the 1920s onward, has started falling out of fashion since the 1970s, a period when a number of crucial alterations in the composition of capital and labour start taking place, for example, the tendential hegemony of immaterial/biopolitical labour. The main goal of this article is to discuss reification in light of contemporary changes in the shape of capitalism such as the above. After discussing the relation between reification, alienation and commodity fetishism, I highlight, largely following Hardt and Negri, how reification under the hegemony of immaterial/biopolitical production is, on the one hand, intensified and, on the other hand, (potentially) easier to diagnose, diminish or overcome, due to the increasing emergence of the common as a social relation antagonistic to capital. The article concludes with a note on Wittgenstein and the critique of reification of the symbolic (language) and the ‘inner’ (affects) as the new extended terrain of struggle.

Modernism, Mental Hygiene, and the Embodiment of Mental Disability

Shifting views of human embodiment during the American mental hygiene movement produced a distinction between what I refer to as psychic and organic forms of mental disability. These categories are useful for better understanding the varying treatment of intellectual difference in twentieth-century Anglo-American society and modernist literature. Applying them to the parallel lives of Emily Holmes Coleman and Carrie Buck illuminates the importance of race and socio-economic class in determining which mental disabilities were diagnosed as immaterial products of the mind's processes—and therefore less dangerous to society—and which were condemned as genetic material defects. Although Coleman's novel, The Shutter of Snow (1930), depicts a psychic condition that overcomes and critiques conceptions of intellectual normalcy, her life and work ultimately suggest the extent to which both modernism and the modernist notion of liberating insanity depend on the doppelganger of an organically defective other for their meaning.

A indústria de software e as metodologias ágeis como estratégia de taylorização e auto-taylorização do trabalho imaterial.

A proposta desse artigo é analisar criticamente as metodologias ágeis, presentes na produção de software. Com este objetivo, nos questionamos em que medida tal produção e formas de organização do trabalho reproduzem antigas formas de organização do trabalho, sobretudo, as taylor-fordistas e as toyotistas. Contrariamente as teses que apresentam a emergência do trabalho imaterial como um momento paradigmático de ruptura com a produção industrial, temos por objetivo debater em que medida o “novo”, presente nessas formas de organização do trabalho no século XXI, se configurariam como adaptações do taylor-fordismo e do toyotismo a uma nova fronteira produtiva pouco ou nada explorada pelo capital nos séculos XIX e XX, a produção imaterial.

Commons-Based Peer Production in the Work of Yochai Benkler

Yochai Benkler defines commons-based peer production as a non-market sector of information, knowledge and cultural production, which is not treated as private property but as an ethic of open sharing and co-operation, and is largely enhanced by the Internet and free/open source software. This paper makes the case that there is a tension between Benkler’s liberal commitments and his anarchistic vision of the commons. Benkler limits the scope of commons-based peer production to the immaterial production of the digital commons, while paradoxically envisaging the control of the world economy by the commons. This paradox reflects a deeper lacuna in his work, revealing the absence of a concrete strategy as to how the immaterial production of the digital commons can connect to material production and control the world economy. The paper concludes with an enquiry into some of the latest efforts in the literature to fill this gap.

Towards a Psychoanalytic Concept of Affective-Digital Labour

This article draws on the argument that users on corporate social media conduct labour through the sharing of user-generated content. Critical political economists argue that such acts contribute to value creation on social media and are therefore to be seen as labour. Following a brief introduction of this paradigm, I relate it to the notion of affective labour which has been popularised by the Marxist thinkers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. To them, affective labour (as a sub-category of immaterial labour) denotes embodied forms of labour that are about passion, well-being, feelings of ease, immaterial products and generally a kind of communicative relationality between individuals. I point to some problems with a lack of clarity in their conceptualisation of affective labour and argue that the Freudian model of affect can help in theorising affective labour further through a focus on social media. According to Freud, affect can be understood as a subjective, bodily experience which is in tension with the discursive and denotes a momentary feeling of bodily dispossession. In order to illustrate those points, I draw on some data from a research project which featured interviews with social media users who have facial disfigurements about their affective experiences online. The narratives attempt to turn embodied experiences into discourse.

The Shadow Prices of Carbon Emissions in China’s Planting Industry

The shadow prices of carbon emissions are essential for assessing emission abatement costs and formulating environmental public policies. By adopting the directional distance function method, this paper studies the shadow prices of carbon emissions caused by three main emission sources from China’s planting industry for a panel of 30 provinces spanning the period 1997–2014. We find that there is considerable regional heterogeneity in the shadow prices, and, of the 30 provinces, 23 are characterized by decreasing trends while only seven are on the rise over time. This implies that there is inefficiency of resource allocation among provinces, and the capacity for abatement increases during the observed period. The results support the following recommendation: It might be worth attempting to bring agriculture in China into line with its emission rights trading scheme, not only to help motivate the reduction of emissions but also to improve resource allocation. Also, policymakers are required to enhance regional cooperation and facilitate carbon-reduction technology transfer, to improve the immaterial production factors’ contribution to planting industry growth.

CONTROL OF SPATIAL PROTECTION IN KAUMAN SEMARANG

Locality and cultural identity aspects are very important to create humane cities in the midst of globalizing world. Kauman Semarang is the city’s cultural identity which has lasted for more than three centuries. Traditionally, Kauman is a village in downtown which reflects Moslem daily live. The physical and social characteristicschange are the reaction of modernization-capitalization pressure of the downtown. The purpose of the research is to find out how Kauman adapts to the incoming pressures. The research was based on ethnographic method by combining ideographic and architectural approaches. In the end of the research, it found that there is a spatial control having protective characteristic or a control of spatial protection conducted by the community. Socioreligious values have influenced in strengthening socio-religious space that produces immaterial products associated with the community’s mentality. Meanwhile, the modernization-capitalization pressures influence the form of significantly developed business-commercial space, and their products are eventually used to support the socio-religious activities. Spatial protection strategy is an answer for the problem of modernization-capitalization pressures in downtown. This finding could be a useful input for the preservation efforts at Kauman Semarang particularly and for cities having similar problems generally.

Youthfulness and immaterial labour in the new economy

The focus of this article is youth and youthfulness in the contemporary economy. Drawing on theories of immaterial labour, the article moves beyond an existing focus on ‘young people’ as capital accumulating subjects to theorize the production of youthfulness as a quality that circulates through immaterial economies and that is mobilized to confer a particular form of value on consumer goods, service interactions and labouring subjectivities. The production of youthfulness is made possible through relations between the micro-level production and consumption that take place within youth cultures and modes of sociality, the production practices and marketing activities of firms, and young people whose capacities for embodiment, sociability and youthful consumption cultivated both within and outside of paid employment contribute to their constitution as labouring subjects. Within this network of relations, youthfulness is mobilized to distribute playful affects, offer the possibility of hedonistic leisure/pleasure and confer symbolic distinctions of cutting edge style. These economies of youthfulness constitute a specific means by which production, consumption, labour and leisure intersect in the labouring subjectivities and immaterial products of the contemporary service economy, and contribute to the formation of valorized and devalorized youth subjectivities in relation to the new economy.