Maurizio Lazzarato Research Articles

Permanent Performance

The concept of immaterial labour, as it was introduced and developed by, among others, Maurizio Lazzarato, Paolo Virno, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, how stimulating its discursive production may have been in many respects, almost automatically leads to a debate on the supposed difference between two types of labour, material and immaterial labour, as well as to the self-deconstructive clause that, in fact, it is quite difficult to distinguish between these two types. If, however, the crucial insight from this debate is that all labour tends to become performative, then it makes sense for theory not to focus any longer on the articulation of the difference between material and immaterial labour, to give up the struggle with the bad binaries of a hopeless ontological discussion, and to begin to imagine the consequences of the general tendency of the becoming performative of labour. Sven Lütticken's concept of general performance allows to operate a strategic shift in the twenty something year old discourse on immaterial labour. Not only has performance become general, but even more so, performance has become permanent. Labour today is characterised by a regime of 'permanent performance'. However, the basic discursive operation implied by the introduction of the concept of permanent performance, as different from Lütticken's concept of general performance, is that it re-inscribes a notion of (measurable) working time into the debate on contemporary labour. This notion had been evacuated from the debate by the debate's initiators, as a consequence of the idea that post-Fordist productivity can no longer be measured. Thus, time as a system of measurement par excellence became a non-issue, whereas in the ordinary lives of the multitude, it is in fact a very important issue.

A univocidade do común. Un percorrido
 dende Spinoza a Deleuze, Lazzarato e Negri-Hardt

El concepto de común es fundamental para construir una teoría política igualitaria, perosi queremos acercarnos a este concepto de lo común con rigor, creemos que es imprescindiblepensar primero un concepto unívoco de ser a partir de Spinoza, que además será clave paraentender a autores como Antonio Negri, Gilles Deleuze o Maurizio Lazzarato, que continuarány asumirán ese camino con el fin de apuntalar una lectura ontológica “común” del ser,antijerárquica e inmanente, lo que ya es una visión política. Una de las maneras es a través dela figura de la multiplicidad y la máquina deleuziana, que nos servirá para ver un ejemplo deconstrucción conceptual común desde la inmanencia; otro modo es a través del concepto deagenciamiento, empleado por Deleuze-Guattari y asumido por Lazzarato en su concepciónpolítica. Por último, el papel de la multitud en este terreno —entendiendo ésta como unasubjetividad política— deviene también importante, motivo por el cual seguiremos a Negri-Hardt en la caracterización que hacen de ella.

Biopoder y eutanasia: aporía del paradigma inmunitario y potencialidad ético-política

The following essay pretends to reflect on euthanasia as a space of resistance and symbolism facing the contemporary society that dehumanizes death and deviates it from the shared social space. The most representative authors of modern biolpolitics are used: Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Maurizio Lazzarato and Antonio Negri. One of the main conclusions achieved is that euthanasia, beyond legal or moral discussions, constitutes a biopolitical exercise in the sense that that it operates as a paradox of the immune paradigm, which precisely enthrones asepsis and artificial prolongation of life, while its constitutes, at the same time, an ontological possibility of resignification and autonomy of human liberty itself.

Cinema, the Post-Fordist Worker, and Immaterial Labor: From Post-Hollywood to the European Art Film

This article examines relations between film and work under conditions of post- Fordist modes of production as they have emerged since 1970s. This necessarily involves engaging with recent po liti cal theories of post- Fordism, and immaterial labor and biopolitics, which were developed in Italy from 1970s and have become extremely influential on contemporary understandings of new modes of work and production. The concept of biopolitics- or, more precisely, biopower- was first developed in Foucault's work in late 1970s, especially introduction to History of Sexuality,1 and seminars such as Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics.2 Foucauldian refers to a contemporary mode of power that directly governs, manages, and monitors life, considered in terms of state of population control and security regimes. As such, it differs both from classical conceptions of sovereign power, based on power over life and death of an absolute ruler, or Foucault's own conceptions of modern power formation in terms of a disciplinary apparatus. This still nascent concept of was famously taken up in work of Giorgio Agamben, especially in Homo Sacer.3 In his earlier essay Form- of- Life, Agamben combines concept of with sovereign power and rejects, or at least problematizes, Foucault's genealogical distinction between sovereign and biopo liti cal modes of power.4 Instead, Agamben discusses biopo liti cal power as governance of what he calls or life.5 He traces concept of bare life to Aristotle, but points out that it took a par tic u lar significance in modernity, especially in such specifically modern sites as concentration camps and in relation to refugees, not covered under term human rights.6 According to Agamben, the first concentration camps in Eu rope were built as a means of controlling refugees ... Jews and Gypsies could be sent to extermination camps only after having been fully denationalized ... When their rights are no longer rights of citizen, that is when humans are truly sacred, in sense that this term used to have in Ancient Rome: doomed to death.7 While governance of stateless populations and even more so management of concentration camps are clear instances of biopolitics as a direct power over life itself, Agamben's insistence on these examples obscures pervasion of whole of social by theorized by Foucault by limiting it only to these extreme cases. Furthermore, it evacuates any possible agency from naked life by situating it as passive and even doomed to death, and therefore is not very amenable for thinking about creativity and re sis tance inherent in work. For these reasons, this article refers to a subsequent reformulation of biopower by Hardt and Negri, and other postautonomist thinkers such as Paolo Virno and Maurizio Lazzarato, who have proposed a division between biopower, understood in Foucauldian sense, and what they call biopolitics, which refers to forms of re sis tance proper to regimes of biopower.8 This conception of biopolitics has advantage of privileging practices of re sistance and creativity over pro cesses of capture and control, and also focuses on sphere of work and its contemporary post- Fordist transformation. This is a much more productive account of biopolitics and bare life than Agamben's account, and one that shifts latter's passive conception of and sacrificial bare life toward what Hardt and Negri call biopo liti cal production, to bring out the synergies of life, or really productive manifestations of naked life.9 The emphasis on biopolitics as production is also usefully applied to cinema. Cinema, in its incorporation and coordination of bodies in movement, can be understood as biopo liti cal in sense that it directly incorporates living pro cesses by means of a technical apparatus that rec ords and then later projects them. …

Bodies and real-time interfaces: in video performance and interactive digital 3D installation art by VALIE EXPORT and Jette Gejl Kristensen

This article considers the interface as the physical interaction of human body and technology inspired by the theories of Maurizio Lazzarato, Brian Massumi, and Anna Munster. Through artworks by VALIE EXPORT (Adjunct Dislocations II) and Jette Gejl Kristensen (Hyperkinetic Kayak) it examines how bodies and advanced technology together perform real-time interfaces in concrete spaces launching complex events of affective encounters.Ulla Angkjær Jørgensen is Associate Professor of Art History, PhD, at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. Her research interests focus on twentieth-century art, contemporary art, visual culture, new media, feminism, and gender perspectives on art history. She has published extensively on these subjects. She is currently a participant in two Norwegian research council projects, Conflicts and Negotiations on gender and valuation in art and literature, and The Sámi Art Project. Latest publication, «Håkki at Home: the Remediation of a Local Place». IN (eds) B. M. Stavning Thomsen & K. Ørjasæter Globalization Art. Negotiating Place, Identity and Nation in Contemporary Nordic Art. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2011.

Lazzarato's 'political entrepreneur' revisited: the case of Noko Jeans

This article revisits Maurizio Lazzarato's 1994 text on the 'strategies of the political entrepreneur' in the context of Noko Jeans, a recent Sweden-based venture to produce jeans in North Korea, while simultaneously influencing the political regime in the country. After a brief introduction to the venture in question, the article reviews Lazzarato's discussion on political entrepreneurship, which interrogates how such entrepreneurial action concurrently generates consumer interest and political discussion, thus blurring the boundary between business and politics. The article then discusses Lazzarato's theoretical points in light of the empirical case of Noko Jeans, first on an analytical level, then in relation to a recent event in which the founders were interviewed. The review thus aims at a re-evaluation of Lazzarato's work, suggesting that his conceptualisation of political entrepreneurship may prove useful when describing phenomena such as Noko Jeans.

The Subjective Architects

The rapid rise of the tween, an influential market-constructed demographic of youth between the ages of 8 and 13, raises several questions. How and why did the tween emerge? How do we account for this downward trend in marketing and the corporate targeting of younger and younger children? And most importantly, for the purposes of my argument, what role has immaterial labor played in demarcating this new category of youth? Initially, Hardt and Negri theorized the shift of production outside the factory walls; this diffused, expanded and intensified production now accounts for new modes of sociality and hence modalities of subjectivization required for capital’s reproduction. As such, the concept of immaterial labor, beginning with Maurizio Lazzarato and extended by Hardt and Negri, is paramount for accounting for new subjective formations such as the tween. This paper illustrates the intensification of immaterial labor by examining how the tween has already “learned to immaterial labor 2.0”. By so doing, it examines the synergy that flows out of the ease in which this demographic moves between the virtual and the material and the marketing practices used to engage and capitalize on their mediated cultural practices.

The Terrorist Entrepreneur

This paper theorizes by means of classical and contemporary social and political theory the figure of the terrorist entrepreneur. The figure is extracted from The 9/11 Commission Report—loosened from the person of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, coordinator of the attacks on the World Trade Centre, shown to express violations of category differences between East and West introduced by Max Weber and still in circulation today. Drawing upon contemporary Italian political theory of semiocapitalism and the strange fauna of political and rhetorical entrepreneurialism found in the works of Maurizio Lazzarato and Paolo Virno, the contemporary features of the terrorist entrepreneur are described.

Another Life

The article focuses on the relation established by Foucault in the two lecture courses Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics between life, nature and political economy. It explores the ways in which liberalism constructs a notion of economic nature as a phenomenon of circulation of aleatory series of events and poses the latter as an internal limit to sovereign power. It argues that the entwinement of vital and economic processes provides the means of internal redefinition of the raison d’État and uses such an explanation to understand the emergence of the network topos as a technology of regulation of the unstable co-causality of milieus of circulation. The article also follows Foucault’s argument that the neoliberal market is significantly different from the liberal market inasmuch as, unlike the latter, it is not defined as an abstract logic of exchange among equals but as an ideal logic of competition between formal inequalities. Finally it asks whether new theories of social production and sympathetic cooperation, in the work of authors such as Yochai Benkler and Maurizio Lazzarato, can offer an alternative to the neoliberal logic of market-based competition as the basis for the production of new forms of life.

Networked Publics: The Double Articulation of Code and Politics on Facebook

Through three case studies of online political activism on Facebook, this article conceptualizes the deployment of issue publics (Lippmann, 1993; Marres, 2005) on Facebook. We argue that issue publics on Facebook come into being through a specific set of double articulations of code and politics that link and reshape informational processes, communicational constraints and possibilities, and political practices in different and sometimes contradictory ways. Using Maurizio Lazzarato’s exploration of immaterial labour (2004), we demonstrate the need to further understand the networking of publics and their issues by considering how online platforms provide the material, communicational, and social means for a public to exist and therefore define the parameters for assembling issues and publics and circumscribe a horizon of political agency.

The Labor of Territories between Deterritorialization and Reterritorialization

Translator's preface Giuseppe Cocco is Professor of Sociology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, one of Brazil's major universities. Before coming to Brazil Cocco, an Italian with French citizenship, studied and worked in Paris at the Sorbonne. There, along with others, he formed several research groups that have attempted to understand the crisis of the Left and to produce a comprehensive and innovative political philosophy inspired by the ideas of Marx, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, and Antonio Negri. In that effort, Cocco, along with Negri, Yann Moulier-Boutang, Francois Matheron, Bruno Karsenti, Jean-Marie Vincent, Maurizio Lazzarato, Antonella Corsani and others formed the journal Futur Anterior. When that journal ceased publication due to differences of opinion and ideological tensions, many of its founders, led by Moulier-Boutang and including Cocco, started the journal Multitudes. While he was in Paris, Cocco's work centered on the relation between mutating forms of labor and labor's corresponding subjectivity, focusing on the way Capital molds its forms of production and how such forms of production are attentive to, and inspire, power and control. As with much of his work, this research was in direct dialogue with the work of Antonio Negri and, in the case of the following essay and subsequent works, drew inspiration from Yann Moulier-Boutang, whose epic text on slavery offers new perspectives on labor before and after the industrial revolution. Cocco's research in Brazil has focused for almost a decade on the cities of Latin America, its ports in particular. He is one of the principal editors of the cultural and political journal Lugar Comum and has edited books on topics ranging from port cities to new modes of communication and their impact on how corporations build plants and distribute goods. In 2000 he published a book in Portuguese entitled Tradalho e Cidadania: producao e direitos na era da globalizacao (Labor and Citizenship: production and rights in the era of globalization) which addresses some of the themes of this essay. In 2003 he co-authored, with Negri and Alejandro Horowicz, Dialogo sobre la globalizacion, la multitud y la experencia Argentina, written in Spanish with a focus on the Argentinian social and economic crisis that has lasted for close to a decade. In 2005 he and Negri co-authored Glob(al), written in Portuguese and Italian and focused on the historical and contemporary differential that thrust Latin America into the age of globalization. The present essay is the first introduction to an English audience of the innovative work of Giuseppe Cocco. In this essay, we are treated to some stunning insights regarding the operations of power (how it constitutes and produces life), a subtle theoretical thematization of the problem of territories, and a vision of the ways that theories of global political economy are often hampered by cynicism about their objects of study. Cocco's essay is a systematic, and perhaps rare, attempt to offer a new way of doing political economy. It challenges its readers by bringing to bear a dose of philosophical acumen, at a time when a moralizing tone often overshadows the intellectual due diligence our present situation deserves. The essay draws dynamically on Foucault's late work and that of Deleuze to explore the possibility of an innovative and philosophically inclined economic perspective. In concluding, I am tempted to suggest that one of the less obvious philosophical resources of the essay is what makes it so unique: Cocco's use of A.O. Hirschman's work on exit supports both the essay's core themes and its main conclusion, which is that the production of subjectivity may be less visible today but is always already aligned with the creation and expansion of formal and informal territories of the industrial and telematic kinds. Abdul-Karim Mustapha Globalization has nourished, on one hand, approaches couched in terms of lack of spatial differentiation and, on the other, debates surrounding themes of regional economy and local development. In fact, the opposition between these two perspectives is nothing but apparent. If the first announces the technical death of time (as per Virilio) and the real (as per Baudrillard), the second regards regionalisms as the space where regulatory functions are activated, which, in the past, was a prerogative of the nation-state. The two approaches evade the new absolute centrality of territories. By mobilizing the notions of smooth and striated space, we propose a reading that links together the dynamics of deterritorialization and reterritorialization.

Futurepublic

This article advances some considerations on the current production of hegemonic effects, starting with some problems posed by the work of one of the most influential writers in cultural studies – the American Palestinian critic Edward Said. Said's commentary on the coverage of Islam in the US media in the late 1970s allows for some challenging considerations on how hegemonic strategies directed at the formation of publics and public opinion are increasingly integrated within a global noopolitics of communication whose understanding of the public is not derived from the notion of civil society but from the biopolitical element of the population – and the bio-racist segmentation that constitutes it. As outlined in Michel Foucault's analysis of liberal and neoliberal governmentality, such understanding of the public locates the latter straight within a new dispositif of power which is biopolitical and noopolitical at the same time, that is, which addresses itself at the same time to the biological, economic and spiritual life of the population. Such understanding involves a reconsideration of the constitution of publics and public opinion in times of netwars and information warfare as both subjects and objects of power/knowledge. In as much as such noopolitics affects what Maurizio Lazzarato calls a second bios, the life of the brain, it has the potential to give expression to the virtual power of immaterial events of subjectification which materialize in the bodies which actualize them and the possible, shared worlds that they are capable of producing.

From The Revolutions of Capitalism

The translation below is an excerpt from Maurizio Lazzarato's book Les revolutions du capitalisme (Paris: Les empecheurs de penser en ronde, 2004) [The Revolutions of Capitalism]. In this book, Lazzarato analyzes the transition from Fordist disciplinary to post-Fordist control societies, and from the struggles of the traditional labor movement to those of the contemporary social movements, by invoking a number of concepts from French post-structuralism. Lazzarato's analysis also builds on the work of French sociologist Gabriel Tarde, and in particular on Tarde's interpretation of Leibniz. The philosophical theories of Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin provide another important reference point. Opening with reflections on a slogan associated with the protests against the 1999 WTO summit in Seattle--Another World is Possible The Revolutions of Capitalism explores the concepts of the possible and the virtual in order to formulate a critique not just of contemporary capitalism's regime of exploitation, but also of traditional strategies of resistance. Capitalism's most recent transformations -and in particular its direct exploitation of intellectual and affective interaction, made possible by the new technologies associated with immaterial laborrequire new theories of the event, of subjectivity, and of the ways in which subjectivity is produced--theories that go beyond socialism's dialectic of the individual and the collective. The traditional Marxist concepts of class, labor, and exploitation need to be re-examined in light of the new configurations of power and resistance characteristic of contemporary capitalism. In the passages translated below, Lazzarato proposes an expansion of the Marxist concept of exploitation and a reconsideration of traditional notions of power, discovering concepts adequate to the reality of contemporary capitalism in the work of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Michel Foucault.

Introduction to an Excerpt from Maurizio Lazzarato's The Revolutions of Capitalism

Introduction to an Excerpt from Maurizio Lazzarato's The Revolutions of Capitalism

Strategies of the Political Entrepreneur

As a student in Padua during the 1970s, Maurizio Lazzarato participated in Autonomia Operaia, and like many other participants, he was driven into political exile in Paris by the Italian state's ruthless repression of that group and others on the extra-parliamentary left. The charges against him were resolved in the 1990s, but he continues to reside in Paris, where he has become a noted independent sociologist and philosopher engaged in research into immaterial labor, the transformation of waged labor, cognitive capitalism and post-socialist social movements. He has published several books, including Videofilosofia, percezione e lavoro nel post-fordismo (Rome: Manifestolibri, 1997) [Videophilosophy: Perception and Labor in Post-Fordism] and Puissances de l'invention: La psychologie &conomique de Gabriel Tarde contre l'conomie politique (Paris: Editions les Empecheurs de penser en rond, 2002) [Powers of Invention: Gabrial Tarde's Economic Psychology Against Political Economy], and served on the editorial boards of the journals Futur anterieur and Multitudes. He has been both an active participant in and an acute analyst of several major social and political movements in Europe over the past decade, including the Tute Bianche and the intermittent entertainment workers. As this essay demonstrates, Lazzarato is also an adept analyst of publicity, cinema and the mass media, and the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism that they reflect. It was originally published in French, in the journal Futur anterieur, in 1994, and later revised for Italian publication in Lazzarato's book Lavoro immateriale: Forme di vita e produzione di soggettivita (Verona: Ombre Corte, 1997) [Immaterial Labor: Forms of Life and the Production of Subjectivity]. The translation is based on the revised Italian version. Timothy S. Murphy, translator

GABRIEL TARDE, POSTFORDISMEN OG DET SOSIALES ONTOLOGI

The aim of this article is to discuss the basic sociological concepts of Gabriel Tarde and in particular his economic sociology, in relation to Maurizio Lazzarato's recent book Puissances de l'invention. The article presents an analysis of Tarde's social ontology, and Tarde's understanding of sociology as an intercerebral psychology where the primary relations between agents lead to different processes of imitations, oppositions and adaptations. Imitation is the process that can explain the overall conformism in society, but different patterns of imitations form oppositions and new inventions need to be integrated into society through adaptations. The importance of inventions comes to the forefront in Tarde's economic sociology. They make it possible for Tarde to decentre classical economic theory and its emphasis upon reproductive patterns of wealth. Lazzarato follows these insights in a critique of the economic relations under Postfordism. This regime of economic regulation is, in a much more fundamental way than previous ones, dependent upon the ingenuity and inventiveness of the workers. At the same time traditional economic concepts are seen to be unsuitable in order to understand its dynamic. The control of the inventiveness by Capital is an obstacle for the free combination of inventive forces. Lazzarato can, however, be criticised for ignoring Tarde's historical frame of reference and, especially, the importance of the concept of civilisation as opposed to the nation-state. A reinterpretation of Tarde's views is presented in relation to this critique and makes it possible to address Tarde's lack of actuality for most of the 20th century.

Transgenic Life: Controlling Mutation

Transgenic Life: Controlling Mutation Melinda Cooper (bio) Foucault’s seminars on biopower form something of an interrupted sequence in his corpus. The term was first introduced in a conference on socialized medicine given in 1974, where Foucault noted that modern capitalism implied an administration of bodies, their forces and time extending beyond the sphere of economic production.[1] The most sustained development on the question can be found in the 1976 seminar of the Collège de France, Il faut défendre la société, which has recently been published in France (1997). Foucault pursued the theme of biopower in all of his seminars up until 1980, although he was turning his attention here to the conditions of its emergence, rather than attempting a precise formulation — he was interested, in particular, in the rise of population as a political category in the eighteenth century and the invention of a liberal discourse of government, two factors he considered essential to the understanding of biopower.[2] But apart from the last chapter of the History of Sexuality, Volume 1, Foucault never returned to the rapid notes of these seminars, as he often did, to formulate a book-length study on the question. It is these seminars, however, that seem increasingly to exercise a certain fascination on political philosophers who have, in some sense or another, encountered the urgency of the bio-political question. Deleuze’s monographical study, where he casts the whole of Foucault’s corpus in the light of the equation between life and resistance, is perhaps the first to accord a preeminent place to the question of biopower (1988). Giorgio Agamben, in a somewhat paradoxical manoeuvre, reconsiders biopower as an ever-present threat internal to the sovereign exercise of power, a state of exception that becomes the rule in totalitarian racial politics (1998). Closer to Deleuze, theorists of “immaterial production” such as Toni Negri and Maurizio Lazzarato, have drawn on a certain reading of Marx to reinvent “biopower” as the paradigmatic figure of post-fordist production (Hardt and Negri 2000), (Lazzarato 1997 and 2000).[3] In the seminar of 1976, Il faut défendre la société, Foucault introduced the notion of biopower in the context of a methodological interrogation of the relations between power, freedom, right and “life”. If the definition of “life” itself remains difficult to pin-point in this work, it is because Foucault is interested in investigating the variable production of specific forms of life within different exercises of power, and in particular in the “how” of power that has governed the administration of life since the eighteenth century. The emergence of biopower, which he identified as a historical transition coincident with the rise of modern capitalism, was at the same time the lever that allowed him to problematize the juridical theory of sovereign power and the historical-materialist dialectic of labor and capital. Within the term biopower, Foucault identified a power-of-life irreducible to the power of life and death that characterizes the sovereign in juridical accounts of political right. Taking Hobbes’ Leviathan as exemplary of the modern theory of sovereign power, he points out that although such an account of political constitution is founded on the postulate of a kind of unmediated or absolute life, it nevertheless accords no positivity to the notion of life. Within the foundational fiction of the state-of-nature, each “man” exercises an absolute freedom involving the drive to overcome all obstacles to self-preservation, but this also translates as an absolute power to take the life of any other man. The flip side of absolute power is absolute powerlessness, since the unmediated freedom of self-preservation is inseparable from a state of total exposure to violence. It is such a postulate that justifies the intervention of political representation, involving a transferal of absolute freedom from the individual’s natural “right” to self-preservation to the sovereign. Hence, the exercise of mediated freedom or right requires a separation of life from the juridical sphere as such, whereby life is at once excluded and protected beneath the category of the subject. In this sense, the protection of the life of the subject involves not so much a positive exercise...

School of Communication's Graduate Critical Studies Conference

School of Communication's annual Graduate Critical Studies Conference will take place this Friday, April 29th and Saturday, April 30th at Harbour Centre, Room 2945. The theme this year is "Dialectics of Space: Enclosure and Resistance." The Keynote Lecture will be by David McNally: “Spatial Dialectics: Capital, Enclosure, Emancipation” (Friday April 29th, 2:00-3:15pm, Harbour Centre 2945) To reserve your ticket, register here: https://www.eventbrite.ca/myevent?eid=24942163683 There will also be a Public Lecture by Maurizio Lazzarato, titled “Financialization and War: Race, Class, Gender and Subjectivity” on Friday April 29th, 7:00-9:00pm, Harbour Centre 1800.Faculty, staff, graduate students, undergraduate students, and members of the general public are all encouraged to attend. For more details, please see the program attached.