The Exploitation of Individuation

8/6/2019 The Exploitation of Individuation

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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN MAINEPortland, Maine

e o it at io n o f I nd i i d ua t i onThe Exploitation of Individuation: N o t e s o n I n f o r m a t i z e d P r o d u c t i o n

A T h e s i sSubmitted in Partial Fulfillment of the

Honors Program Requirements

Nigel Stevens

A T h e s i sSubmitted in Partial Fulfillment of the

Honors Program Requirements


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Thesis / Project Submitted by: _Nigel Stevens__________________

Approved By:

Principal Thesis Advisor _Jason Read____________________

Department _Philosophy____________________

Signature ______________________________

Thesis Advisor _George Caffentzis_______________

Department _Philosophy_____________________

Signature _______________________________

Thesis Advisor _Shelton Waldrep________________

Department _English________________________

Signature _______________________________

Honors Director _Rose Cleary___________________

Signature _______________________________

Received by the University Honors Program on _________________


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Contents

I. Abstract..............................................................................................3

II. Preface...............................................................................................4

III. Act One:Information Theory.............................................................7

IV. Act Two:Information Revolution.......................................................22V. Act Three:Two Theses......................................................................36

VI. Notes................................................................................................39

VII.References..........................................................................................42


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ABSTRACT

This project develops out of the simple question: how does information function

within todays so-called Information Age?In contemporary critical theory, specifically in

the thought of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, the answer has been posed in

terms of immaterial labor and a new mode of informatized production. Though

this project is not meant as a total critique of Negri and Hardts work, it ismeant as a

particular critical intervention: one proposing that their understanding of this new,

informatized process of valorization functions via a reified understanding of

information. In positing information as always-already complete, value-rich pieces of

wealth, Negri, Hardt, and perhaps others of the Autonomist tradition are rendered

unable to provide an adequate account of the exploitation of living labor (instead

offering only the strange hypothesis that informational accumulation immediately

appropriates what amounts to fixed capital in the form of information-products).

So instead we begin with Gilbert Simondons innovative understanding of

information. Following his methodological maxim, that the notion of form must be

replaced by that of information, we analyze information as a productive process of

psychosocial individuation wherein the psyche, the collective, and the epistemic are

constituted in the same movement (rather than analyzing theform of informatized

production, wherein information appears as a fully-constituted collection of facts).

This account of information-as-production provides a base to study the exploitation

of psychosocial individuation, where the living labor of information-power, our basic

human capacity to in-form, is employed to produce the very schemas that subject us.


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PREFACE

Critical theory in our present age fails if it does not address how information

functions today. After all, information appears everywhere and always in our

common, everyday discourse: we hear it crackle through the boardroom

speakerphone, watch it animate our liquid crystal news feeds, we question it openly

in our courtrooms, but devoutly believe it directs our hospitals and classrooms from

the shadows. More than anything else though, we of the Information Age entrust this

curious techogeist to spin the turbines of capitalist enterprise ad infinitum. So we use

information pragmatically, and identify it intuitively. It is a curious and unfortunate

practice.

To be sure, there are analogous concepts that are lazily made use of on a

fairly regular basis. The most proximate and obvious examples are data, knowledge

and (though perhaps less frequently these days) wisdom. Yet, while the study of

knowledge and wisdom remains near and dear to the hearts of philosophers, they are

concepts without the daily presence awarded by the market. Datum certainly has this

presence, as massive amounts of data are bought and sold every day, but data is

conventionally distinguished from information in that information tends to carry

the connotation of meaning, or of being more refined. As such information becomes

a concern for a much wider variety of industries, particularly those nearest the

culture industry. Enjoying such a wide economic applicability, the concept of

information necessarily permeates our discourse and our thought.


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Conducting a rigorous genealogy of this concept would therefore be, most

likely, a tremendously fruitful project in critical theoryone perhaps beginning

somewhere in the dotcom boom of the 1990s, extending back to the dawn of

information theory and cybernetics following WWII, and concluding with the

words etymological origins in the 14th centuryhowever this all remains beyond the

scope of our immediate project. Instead the project at hand consists of analyzing how

exactly we recognize the day-to-day functioning of information today. It is an

interrogation that is at once theoretical and practical, both ontological and economic.

Considering this mode of inquiry, the concept of information is not approached here

in a very technicalmanner; though it may be of some interest to programmers,

hackers, telecom engineers, and cypherpunks, the work herein is ultimately meant as

one of social ontology and political economy, rather than computer science or

communication theory.

Towards this end, a methodology of juxtaposition is utilized. First we follow

a close reading of Gilbert Simondons The Genesis of the Individual. In

transducing his path of investigation across the obscured presuppositions of the

principle of individuation (one of philosophys most venerable notions), Simondon

presents us with an understanding of information as an insistentlyproductiveprocess.

Second we trace the conceptual constellations of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardts

collaborations in order to analyze how informations productivity is valorized by

capital within our contemporary, informatized mode of production. The point of

intersection, as well as the conclusive theses, constitutes an analysis of how

contemporary exploitation oflivinglabor may be more readily approached in


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Simondonian terms rather than the Autonomist coupling of immaterial labor and

informational accumulation.


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the same article, lecture, film, etc. can easily be considered informative by one person

and not by another. It is a difference in affection, and as such informativity must be

associated with the disruption of ones cognitive and epistemic structures such that

there is aproduction of something new. This logical disparity between information-as-

transmission and information-as-production is of no light consequence. For as

actions and techniques of production are considered informative, at the same time

actions and techniques of transmission take information as their cargo, thus resulting

in a dissonance of ontological proportions wherein information seems to function as both

the principle and the product of individuation.

To fully express the weight of this hypothesis requires the assistance of an

interlocutor, and to discuss information and individuation in the same breath is to

invoke the work of Gilbert Simondon. Though largely marginalized within the

history of philosophy, this 20th century philosopher of technology has engaged with

the principle of individuation and the concept of information with a rigor and

creativity that is vital to navigating how information functions today. If we follow

Simondon across his critique of the principle of individuation, through to his

appropriation of the concept of information, then we may begin to resolve the

epistemic dissonance that makes it so difficult to directly answer: how do we

recognize information in an Information Age? Thus we will begin this new line of

interrogation where Simondon begins, with The Genesis of the Individual.

In this investigation, Simondons critical project is two-fold. First, he argues

that whenever we consider the living being as an individualtaking a constituted

individual as a logical and ontological given, and proceeding to search out a


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principle of individuation by which to explain its individualitywhenever we

formulate the problem of individuation in this manner, we ultimately presume that

it is the individual qua the already constituted individual that is the most noteworthy

reality, the one to be explained.1 Second, as this presupposition becomes more

deeply entrenched in our ideologies and methodologies, a conflation takes hold in

which, as Gilles Deleuze puts it, individuation is perceived to be everywhere. We

make it a characteristic coextensive with being.... We remake all being in its image.2

Simondons project is to expose this unproductive practical and theoretical tendency

(wherein we ignore the processes by which individuals actually become individuals,

and approach all of being as though it consisted of ready-made, discrete and

complete individuals), so as to demand we instead attempt to understand the

individual from the perspective of the process of individuation rather than the process of

individuation by means of the individual.3

Of course, to understand the individual from the perspective of individuation

is easier said than done. The traditions of doing the opposite are, as Simondon

details, both long and varied (covering both the hylomorphic and substantialist

traditions). Simondon contends that this prevalence in approaching all of being as

always-already individuated remains a firmly historical, even genealogical, issue. He

argues that the concept of metastable equilibrium has played a central, generative

role in forming epistemic and discursive structures that allow for the expression of

individuation, and that this concept of metastability is itself genealogically related to

the notions of order and entropy.4 In other words, as the concepts of order and

entropy became established within a physical paradigm (specifically the


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crystallization process recruited by Simondons argument), it became possible ...to

grasp the activity which is at the very boundaryof the crystal in the process of

formation. Such an individuation is not to be thought of as the meeting of previous

form and matter existing as already constituted and separate terms, but a resolution

taking place in the heart of a metastable system rich in potentials...5 Thus, in

following Simondon, we can assert that individuation begins with a preindividual

state of being that becomes problematized, supersaturated, or out of step with itself

(to the point of disparity); after this irrevocable shift in distribution of power, energy,

or affectivityafter this activationthe system enters into a metastablestate that

demands resolution, stabilization, and is thus thrown in-formation.6

This physical sense of information, where being is literally in-formation to

resolve a system that is objectively problematic, is a vital discursive rupture that

provides an initial opening by which we might begin to analyze information as a

production rather than as a product. Yet, on its own, this physical sense may seem too

distant from the concepts common usage to be considered anything more than a

homonym. Critics may exclaim that information in this oddly physical sense simply

becomes conflated with individuation, or even with being qua becoming; they might

thus condemn it as a kind of sophistic, postmodern language game that bears no

significance on the day-to-day pragmatics of information in the Information Age.

However, let us restate at this juncture that the project at hand is to examine how

information functionsin precisely this day-to-day fashion. The everyday relationship

between individuation and information is a real and complicated one though, thus

requiring sustained analysis of individuation within the various domains of being.


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So for the moment then what we must not lose sight of is that the paradigm of

physical individuation (crystallization, rock formations, and the like) is only utilized

in Simondons argument to express the simple notion that individuation proceeds as

the organization of a solution to a metastable condition. In fact, Simondon is

quick to point out that it is only within the physical domain of being that

individuation takes place in this specific, definitive manner. By contrast

individuation in the organic/living domain remains a perpetual transaction: ...the

living being conserves in itself an activity of permanent individuation. It is not only the result

of individuation, like the crystals or the molecule, but is a veritable theater of

individuation.7 The nuances of Simondons proposition are important. The

suggestion is that in the organic/living realm there is a dramatic,productiveactivity to

individuation, that individuation is brought about by the individual itself, and is not

simply... comparable to the product of a manufacturing process.8 Hence, insofar as

organic/living being does not simply modify its relationship to its milieu but is

instead capable of modifying itselfthrough the invention of new internal structures,

Simondon asserts that this living being can therefore be understood as a node of

information organizing and resolving itself intrinsically in the very same moment it

is forced to extrinsically organize and resolve.9 With this observation we find

Simondons first gestures towards conceptualizing information, but his actual

elucidation of the term demands we first follow his investigation through a final

domain of being: that of the psychosocial.

It is worth noting that it is Simondons work regarding this phenomenonthe

individuation of the psychosocialthat has truly garnered most of the renewed


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interest in his critical project. After the poststructuralist critiques of the Subject, an

ever-increasing number of critical theorists have found that Simondon offered

something of an alternative. The key insight Simondon offers us is that [t]he two

individuations, psychic and collective, have a reciprocal effect on each other; they

allow us to define a transindividual category that might account for the systematic

unity of internal individuation (psychic) and external individuation (collective).10 As

such, the importance of this transindividual category cannot be understated, for it

defies reduction to either the category of the social or that of the interindividual (or

the intersubjective as one more often hears). We must instead consider the

transindividual as functioning in a domain that is both psychic andcollectivea

psychosocial domainfor neither the immediacy of the social nor the mediacy of the

interindividual can properly express relations as resolutionsto preindividual problematics.

That is to say, the problematics that project psychic individuation break prior to the

constitution of an individual as such, and hence cannot be expressed in individuated

terms; through ruptures and shifts in biological, linguistic, and/or historical

potentials the psychosocial enters into a metastable state, one whose disparation

must thus be located before both the social and the individual, it must be

preindividual. Furthermore, since the problematic precedes both the individual and

the collective, its resolution must therefore be transindividual; it must communicate,

not some general relation between the individual and society, but rather the specific

relation of their genealogical unity, their twin genesis; i.e., such a resolution must

define the relation between their constitutive relations.11

Thus through his work on individuation, particularly regarding the


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individuation of the psychosocial through the establishment of transindividual

relations, Simondon ultimately proposes an ontological status for relations that is

radically different from what is commonly accepted.12 He reasons:

In general, what we consider to be a relation, due to the substantialization of reality of theindividual, in fact forms a dimension of the process of individuation by which the individual

becomes. In other words, the relation to both the world outside and to the collective is in facta dimension of the individuation in which the individual participates due to its connection with

the preindividual reality that undergoes gradual individuation.13

If we take Simondons project seriouslyif we attempt to understand the individual

from the process of individuation rather than the process of individuation from the

individualthen it becomes vitally important to acknowledge this significant

ontogenetic importance of relations. We cannot consider relations merely external to

the unified, completed, already-constituted individual, for they functionally serve as

the generative, productive force constituting an individual as such. But it is

particularly in the psychosocial domain that this obscured generative capacity of

relations becomes a concern for the project at hand. For it is only when we reach this

domain of the psychosocial that the critique of the principle of individuation enters

into communication with the more familiar discourses that envelop information; for

it is only in the psychosocial domain that we canand in fact mustspeak of

knowledge and epistemology.

Individuation of the psychosocial is, after all, always also the individuation of

concepts, axioms, languageor to say the same thingthe individuation of

knowledge. Simondon is clear though that relations within the psychosocial domain

are not generative of knowledge due to adaptive reflexes between an individual and

some homogeneous milieu, nor because of a relation between a knowing subject and

an object known, but rather they are generative because they have the same


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genealogical origin in ...aprimary tropistic unity, a coupling of sensation and tropism, the

orientation of a living being in a polarized world.14 The proposition then is that

knowledge does not accumulate through abstraction of the sensible but rather

crystallizes through coalescencearound the particular polarities and tropisms of

sensation. With this assertion Simondon effectively shifts his critique of the principle

of individuation from the ontological battlefield of hylomorphism and atomism to

the equally perennial epistemological agonism of the a priori and the a posteriori:

What I mean by this is that the a priori and the a posteriori are not to be found in knowledgeitself. They represent neither the form nor the matter of knowledge since they themselvesare not knowledge but the extreme poles of a preindividual dyad, and are consequently

prenoetic. The illusion that there are a priori forms derives from the preexistence ofpriorconditions of totalityin the preindividual system, whose dimensions are greater than the

individual undergoing ontogenesis. On the other hand, the illusion that the a posterioriapplies can be explained by the existence of a reality whose order of magnitude is inferior tothat of the individual seen in the light of spatiotemporal modifications. A concept is neither apriori nor a posteriori but a prasenti because it is an informative and interactivecommunication between that which is larger than the individual and that which is smaller.15

Hence information (or at least informativity) emerges as a means of expressing the

status of a concept as an always-contemporaneous communication between that

which precedes or exceeds the individual (nature, language, art, romance, etc.) and

that which succeeds or proceeds from the individual (actions, sensations, feelings,

mannerisms, positions, etc.). A concept is thus considered a communication insofar

as it functions within a relation of disparity, but it is considered informativeinsofar as

it strives towards resolution of these disparate dimensions.

Finally, then, we can properly address Simondons conception of how

information functions. For these problematic instances of psychic metastability

these preindividual ruptures that throw the psyche into questiondemand resolution

through participation in wider, collective individuations: hence, information (of the

psyche) functions through the resolution of metastability in the production of transindividual


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relations. This should become clearer via the following passage:

This set of revised notions [that resolution of the psyche requires participation in a wider,collective individuation] is supported by the hypothesis stating that a piece of information isnever relative to a unique and homogeneous reality, but rather two orders that are in theprocess of disparation. The piece of information, whether it be at the level of tropistic unity

or at the level of the transindividual, is never delivered in a format that can be given in asimple way. It is the tension between the two disparate realities, it is thesignification thatemerges when a process of individuation reveals the dimension through which two disparate realities

together become a system. If this is the case, then the piece of information acts as an instigationto individuation, a necessity to individuate; it is never something that is just given. Unity and

identity are not inherent in the information because information is itself not a term. For thereto be information presupposes that there is a tension in the system of the being: theinformation must be inherent in a problematic since it represents thatby which theincompatibility within the unresolved system becomes an organized dimension in its resolution. Theinformation implies a change of phase in the systembecause it implies the existence of a

primitive preindividual state that is individuated according to the dictates of the emergingorganization. The information provides a formula that is followed by individuation, and sothe formula could not possibly preexist this individuation. One could say that the information

always exists in the present, that it is always contemporary, because it yields the meaningaccording to which a system is individuated.16

Information becomes considered almost a kind of phenomenon then, but no longer

in a broadly physical sense. For while crystallization and the like provide a physical

paradigm for metastability and the individuation that resolves it (i.e. a paradigm for

being in-formation), Simondon makes clear in the passage above that, in his

conception, information functions through an instigation to individuate, through a

promise oforganization, and, most importantly, through the emergence of signification

wherein two disparate realities become a system. Thus, while information may also be

discussed within physical or organic domains of being, Simondons insistence on

signification places his project directly in communication with common and

theoretical conceptions of information insofar as they are all situated firmly within

the psychosocial domain of knowledge, signification, and conceptual organization.

Yet if we have accurately located Simondons theory of information,

traditional theories of information, and common usages of the term all within an

immanent plane, then we must now be very clear about their extreme divergence.


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For this we turn to the excellent study of Simondons work, Tertium Datur?Gilbert

Simondons Relational Ontology in Alberto Toscanos The Theatre of Production.

Toscanos work is crucial in following how Simondon understands this phenomenon

of information-as-emergent-signification. It would, for example, be a grave mistake

to conflate his phenomenology of emergent signification with theories of signals and

their transmission. Toscano elucidates:

What [Jaques] Garelli correctly highlights in Simondons work is the attempt to appropriatethe concept of information for a consideration of ontogenesis in terms that would precede andcondition the formation and circumscription of these individual entities that go by the namessender, receiverand code. The real object of Simondons attack is the hegemony of the

mathematical theory of information, the probabilistic modelling of the transmission of

information and the determination of measures of orders (bits). Instead, he wishes tointerrogate the ontological blind spot of those uses of information which claim that itprovides the necessary and sufficient conditions for individuation processes. Aware of thevery strict criteria laid out by Shannon and Weaver for the application of information as ameasure of order, understood as the possibility or availability of choice, Simondon turns hisattention towards the genesis of the systems of relations that constitute the formal andontological condition for those operations which the theory of information aims to explainand measure. Like Nietzsche, then, Simondon is interested in thegenesis of measure, and

specifically those systems whose relations, exchanges, and transformations could beamenable to measurement.17

We misunderstand Simondon terribly then if we equate his notions (information,

metastability, and psychosocial individuation) with those notions (information,

senders, receivers, and codes) of the transmission schemas (i.e., cybernetic,

information, and communication theories), because these schemas must presuppose

set routes or plans of organization through which something called information

might flow in a predictable and measurable manner; whereas, in Simondons usage,

information must be considered as the orientation or sense of individuation, not its

measure or, even worse, its separate and transcendent source.18 In other words,

Simondons appropriation of the concept strives to express how the genesis of

relations in factproducesa system of measure, how the epistemic structure (metrics,

taxonomies, etc.) of such a system becomes organized in the very same instance that


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senders and receivers emerge as such. Thus this evental and generative

understanding of information must be considered within a schema ofproduction rather

than transmission.

This last point should also make clear how Simondon is departing from a

more common use of the term. For rather than considering information as something

possessed and exchanged by individuals, individuals themselves become nodes of

information or ever-emerging signal-sign systems.19 Hence it doesnt make any

sense to speak of delivering or passing along information in a Simondonian

sense; rather,participation becomes informations modus operandi. Fidelity to

Simondons project demands that we emphasize once more though that this

participation is not one of transmissive exchange; it is not synonymous with some

kind of vulgar act of communication where two participants exchange

information. Participation is instead considered here as participation in and out of

psychosocial problematics; it is the cooperative activity found in the production of

concepts and signification, a production capable of retooling heterogeneous cognitive

and epistemic tension into communicative compatibility.

The critics may interject at this juncture: Surely though information isif

not measurableat least capable of being acquired, exchanged, and transmitted once

it is produced. To suggest otherwise would be to deny the very possibility of

Knowledge and Truth! Despite such a grave admonishment, we must insist that

information never really enjoys the autonomous, exchangeable existence we so often

presume it holds. For even if we consider information synonymous with the facts,

it becomes immediately and performatively clear that, as such, information must


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function through an invocation within a particular problematic (i.e. that information

as such is never utilized as simply the facts but always the facts of). How, after all,

do we recognize the functioning of a trial other than through competition between

invocations of evidence? How do we recognize the functioning of science itself

without its steady stream of citation-invocations? These questions are not meant to

achieve the rhetorical effect of emphasizing some transcendental invokabilityof

information-as-fact, but rather they strive to express how it is only through

orientation within a problematic that the accuracy or validity of information-as-fact

can possibly be determined. It becomes impossible toproveeven the facts that every

elementary school student knows (e.g., that Christopher Columbus discovered

America, that there are eight planets in our solar system, that 1+1=2) without some

insertion into the problematics out of which this information arises (who do we

recognize the discovery of America?, how do we recognize a planet?, how do we

measure or recognize an amount?).

The complication here is largely chronological, then, for while information

does begin with the emergence of cognitive-epistemic tension, the faulty assumption

becomes (due to the substantialization of reality by the individual) that

information always and completely settles into a subsequent, identifiable and

transmissive product-resolution. Yet, as Toscano points out, insofar as these

problematic preindividual tensions partially reside within the psyche, ...the event of

information does not disappear with an initial morphogenesis, constituting instead

the continuous becoming of the individual through the resolution of its internal

disparation.... This is why information does not simply name the resolution of


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disparity or the communication between individualities, but also refers to the process

ofindividualization.20 In other words, Simondon does not consider the phenomenon

of information-as-emergent-signification as a resolution in the conclusive and

definitive sense of the word, but rather uses the term to denote a resolving production

that demands a more nuanced chronology and topology. For though this production

may stratify local epistemic structures in an instantaneous and particular way (such

that certain signs begin to signal quantitatively as facts), the metastable psyche

remains stuck in continuous production, attempting to relieve itself of preindividual

disparation.

Granted this assertionthat part of informations productive functioning is

carried out in productive processes of individualizationmay at first seem odd, but

let us consider for a moment: what else does information do?Indeed, even if we were to

disregard all that has been said thus far and accept the transmissive schema of

information-as-fact, the question would still remain: what function does the transmission

of information serve?Information-as-factwhether we consider it in civic, military,

legislative, financial, demographic, genealogical, or genetic circuitsdemands the

proposition that the effective transmission of such information works to form, affect,

individuate and individualize the actions of the informed; without this proposition,

the description of anyone or anything as informed or informative would be

rendered unintelligible. The transmission schema of information thus carries a kind

of promise of enlightenment; which is to say, it promises that as a person or group

accumulatesinformation they become evermore individuated and individualized as

enlightened beings. The paradoxical answer to the question what is the function of


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information? seems to be that, though we treat information as a product of

individuation (insofar as we consider information fully-constituted, complete,

transmittable, etc.), within the very same paradigm we consider it to also function as

the principle of individuation in the modern world. For it is a paradigm wherein armies

adjust their strategies to tactical information, marketing departments promote their

projects based upon demographic information, and our bodies themselves develop

along the paths of their genetic information. We may call this process adaptation,

evolution or any other name, but it is clear that a process of individualization is

intimately intertwined with what is already recognized as information.

Of course, this is not the question we were attempting to answer. The

question what is the function of information? is very different from how does

information function in the Information Age? That disparity is entirely the point

though, for our argument here is not that information exists as a mass of atomic

units, each possessing some transcendent telos, some bit of enlightenment to pass

along, but rather the project at hand has been to analyze how the process of

information functions on a day-to-day level through the productive, individuating

and individualizing effects of resolving psychosocial disparation. Thus, if we have

successfully argued that the recognition of informativity today depends upon the

extent to which an individualizing affect is elicited within the psyche, then it

corresponds to our final hypothesis that in the Information Age information functions

as neither the principle, nor as the product of individuation but rather as individuations

productive capacity in the psychosocial domain. So, then, if our task has been to establish

a methodology for examining how information functions today, then we have at


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least established that traditional, transmissive information theories cannot be used

towards this end. The analysis of informations function cannot presuppose

information as either a principle or as a product of individuation; we must instead

analyze information as it already functions: we must analyze information as a production.

Such an analysis thus requires us to ask a very different question. We must depart

from the philosophical, technological terrain of our how does information

function? interrogation and shift our analysis to a science of empire and cyberspace;

that is to say, we must now ask the question: how does information produce value?


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Act Two: Information Revolution

Has there been a rupture in our mode of production? A question worth

considering, as weve been told time and again that our present age has undergone

an economic revolution.21 But whether called rupture or revolution, within the

Autonomist tradition of political theory, it has clearly become established that such a

paradigmatic shift projects from labors passages out of industrialization into what

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt refer to as postmodernization or

informatization.22 Informatization must become our second site of interrogation

then; for this hypothesisthat the current mode of production centers upon the

prevalent, everyday labor of information manipulationimmediately confronts us

with two problems: the first revolves around how this technique of manipulation

functions within valorization, i.e., how information manipulation creates value for

capitalist enterprise; the second follows from our investigation in the previous section,

questioning how we might recognize the manipulation ofinformation-as-production.

This two-fold nature of our present problematic is precisely why we begin by

confronting Negri, Hardt, and the Autonomist tradition. Through their analysis of

immaterial labor, biopolitical production, and the general intellect, we are presented

with informatizations social, economic, and political implications in a theory that,

though problematic in its own right, should allow us to express the ways in which

information-as-production functions in capitalist valorization, as well as how this

human capacity to inform has become subject to techniques of capitalist exploitation.

Let us not get ahead of ourselves, though. In taking informatization as our


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site of interrogation, we have an immediate imperative to establish how this premise

(that information holds the dominant position in our current mode of production) is

not meant to suggest that industrial production is somehow nonexistent today, or

that it will somehow vanish tomorrow. Negri and Hardt address this explicitly:

Just as the processes of industrialization transformed agriculture and made it moreproductive, so too the informational revolution will transform industry by redefining andrejuvenating manufacturing processes. The new managerial imperative operative here is,Treat manufacturing as a service. In effect, as industries are transformed, the division

between manufacturing and services is becoming blurred. Just as through the process ofmodernization all production tended to become industrialized, so too through the process ofpostmodernization all production tends toward the production of services, toward becominginformationalized.23

Yet, while this defense corresponds quite faithfully to their general description of

informatization as a kind of migration in labor from its secondary forms of industrial

manufacturing of goods to the tertiary forms of servicing clients, the question

remains: how can information possibly be considered central to capitals valorization

in a global mode of production in which industry continues (and even accelerates)

the exploitation of the impoverished and the dispossessed?

The answer is rather complicated, for in Hardt and Negris work on

informatized modes of production, valorization proceeds in a curious manner via

immaterial labor, a concept that has been circulating within the Autonomist

tradition for quite some time now. During the 1990s Negri, Hardt, and others

(including Jean-Marie Vincent, Maurizio Lazzarato, and Paolo Virno) developed

many concepts, including immaterial labor, in the journalFutur Antrieur. Eventually

the collaborations ofFutur Antrieurlead to the bookRadical Thought in Italy, wherein

immaterial labor is glossed as:

Commodities in capitalist society have come to be less material, that is, more defined bycultural, informational, or knowledge components or by qualities of service and care. Thelabor that produces these commodities has also changed in a corresponding way. Immaterial


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labor might thus be conceived as the labor that produces the informational, cultural, oraffective element of the commodity. One central characteristic of the new forms of labor thatthis term tries to capture is that the labor is increasingly difficult to quantify in capitalistschemata of valorization: in other words, labor time is more difficult to measure and lessdistinct from time outside of work. Much of the value produced today thus arises fromactivities outside the production process proper, in the sphere of nonwork.24

Information becomes considered the center of capitals valorization then insofar as it

denotes an immaterial component of a commodity that imbues the commodity with

value. The catch is, then, that, according to Hardt and Negri, the law of value is

broken; capital has been reduced to merely capturing the value from information that

is spontaneously and autonomously produced in the sphere of nonwork by todays

cooperative, socialized workers. So adamant are Negri and Hardt on this point that

inLabor of Dionysusthey go so far as to say that immaterial laborers have refused to

become subject to capitalist exploitation in both the old and the new forms.25

Yet exploitation has hardly gone away. Indeed, this problem of exploitation is

one of the central questions that drives Nick Dyer-Withefords excellent essay

Cyber-Negri: General Intellect and Immaterial Labor. Citing the sharp critique of

George Caffentzis, Dyer-Witheford underscores how Negris emphasis upon this role

of informatized, immaterial labor in the age of automatic industrial processes

drastically overlooks global capitalisms empirical elephant:

A vast new proletariat...driven off the[ir] land by the advances of agribusiness andcondemned to an existence in a desperate informal labor market revolving around industriessuch as the sex and drug trades, domestic labor, animal exports, smuggling of arms andhumansor to work in new industrial centers. These dispossessed populations supplied thelabor force for manufacturing plants whose apparent dematerialization from high-wage North

was actually only a transnational relocation towards China, Central and Latin America,Southern Asia, and Eastern Europe.26

In other words, capital did not simply resign to becomingas Negri and Hardt first

suggestedmerely an apparatus of capture poised against the new, highly

socialized, immaterial labor force; rather, as Dyer-Witheford observes in Caffentzis


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recent history, what was appearing on a global scale was a reinstitution of the most

basic and brutal mechanisms of primitive accumulation.27

Herein lies the deep problem of Negri and Hardts early thesis: while they did

raise an important hypothesis, that cooperation produces value outside the

traditional confines of work, they were far too quick to dismiss capitalist exploitation

(in both its old and new forms nonetheless). Perhaps they were overcome by the

optimism of the moment, one fueled by the burgeoning insubordination in the

strikes of a new generation of autoworkers...; in the Panther movement of Italian

students...; and in the grievances and mobilizations of Parisian fashion and

multimedia workers.28 Yet, even if they have since expanded their revolutionary

geography to account for the massive increases in very old, very brutal forms of

exploitation, their initial dismissal of the force of capitalist exploitation was based on

a hypothesis that seems alive and well in their theory: that capitalismtoday functions in

a parasitic manner, one incapable of exploiting our mode of production as it once did, for our

new networks of cooperation now produce autonomously of capitals command. Negri argues

this point rather explicitly in his lesson On Social Ontology. He presents the

hypothesis in terms of a change in value accumulation:

...there is no longer an outside [to capital], not even a marginal outside. Hence, capitalistdevelopment and the capitalist creation of value are based more and more on the concept ofsocial capture of value itself. The capture of this innovation, an expression of creative activity,is the result of a growing socialization of production. This in turn means: the enterprise musthave the ability to valorize the wealth produced by networks that do not belong to it; the

enterprise (and thus the organization of cognitive capitalism) is increasingly based on acapacity for private appropriation, imposed through the capture of social flows of cognitivelabour. It follows from this that exploitation goes back to being, once again, the extraction ofabsolute surplus value, since, in order to produce, capital employs only command.29

In regards to the last line, Negri does actually begin to reintroduce an understanding

of exploitation into his theory at this point. However, shortly afterwards, he totally


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outside.31 Yet, as we already began to address above, this is not a distinction that

Negri finds to be particularly valid anymore. And although Negri and Hardt do

maintain that primitive accumulation continues, they also hold that there has been a

change in its mode of operation due to the progressively deteriorating demarcation of

inside from outside. They refer to this new mode of primitive accumulation as

informational accumulation, a concept that is meant to again illustrate how ...the

nature of the labor and wealth accumulated is changing. In postmodernity the social

wealth accumulated is increasingly immaterial; it involves social relations,

communication systems, information, and affective networks.

32

Finally, then,

informational accumulation becomes the key to capitalist valorization in an

informatized mode of production; it is the mechanism by which the apparatus of

capture functions, but of what exactly does this process consist?

Tellingly, the matter comes down to chronology once again. They write:

As the new informational economy emerges, a certain accumulation of information isnecessary before capitalist production can take place. Information carries through its

networks both the wealth and the command of production, disrupting previous conceptionsof inside and outside, but also reducing the temporal progression that had previously definedprimitive accumulation. In other words, informational accumulation (like the primitiveaccumulation Marx analyzed) destroys or at least destructures the previously existingproductive processes, but (differently than Marxs primitive accumulation) it immediatelyintegrates those productive processes in its own networks and generates across the differentrealms of production the highest levels of productivity. The temporal sequence ofdevelopment is thus reduced to immediacy as the entire society tends to be integrated in someway into the networks of informational production. Information networks tend towardsomething like a simultaneity of social production.33

This process of informational accumulation turns out to be a bizarre mechanism of

accumulation indeed; the apparatus of capture appears to capture value before

production even takes placeby means of seizing already-value-rich information. Actual

industrial production (and the brutal conditions that so often accompany it) becomes

a kind of afterthought since wealth and command are already accumulated in the


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appropriation of information produced in networks of nonwork. Clearly, though,

Hardt and Negri arrive at this hypothesis by approaching information in its common,

reified (dare we say fetishized) manner: as a settled product, one capable of being

accumulated and exchanged. Thus, though Negri and Hardt are keenly aware of the

chronological dissonance lurking about informationaware that it is treated as a

stable, accumulable product, yet functions in the continuous, simultaneousproduction

of psyche, collectivity, and communicable signstheir continued treatment of

information as a stable product renders it impossible for them to maintain the immaterial labor

hypothesis without unintentionally posing capitalist accumulation as the expropriation of

already-existing wealth, i.e., as the expropriation of fixed capital.

This fact is perhaps the most pressing reason to consider Simondons work on

information and individuation, for without a clear conception of information-as-

production it becomes uncertain where exactly exploitation of this process occurs in

day-to-day life (or, if you prefer, in living labor). To be sure, Hardt and Negri (as well

as Virno and many others of the tradition) are deeply concerned with both living

labor and the forms of exploitation present today. However, the conception of

informational accumulation and the general tendency to reify information obscures

the exploitation of information by analyzing it as a distinct and complete commodity

that is always-already circulating in markets or networks. In other words, it never

really becomes clearhow, when, orwhereinformation becomes valuable in these

transmissive schemas, only that to accumulate more value one must accumulate

more of the information-commodity. Analysis that follows from this commodified

conception of information, therefore, not only falls prey to Simondons fallacy


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department, the various classifications of degrees and licenses, page views for

websites, states of internship and, of course, tried and true labor-time).

In utilizing this concept of information-power, it becomes possible to express

the way exploitation continues today, not simply as a technique of seizing already-

existing wealth, but as a technique of generating wealth through employing the live

activity of human beings. At its base, then, the buying of information-power

demonstrates how information functions within capitalist valorization as a means of

subsumption and validation. For the buying of information-power is truly the buying

of a humans capacity to create value as such; echoing one of Negris most important

and eloquent insights that ...todaypoverty is the simple fact of not being able to make your

activity worth something.34 That is to say, poverty has become the state of being

unable to makeyour activity valuable, the state of being unable to classifyand quantify

your activity into terms that can be bought and sold. Indeed as we are evermore

subjected to the rubrics of employee performance, credit approval, and so-called

austerity cuts, how can we agree with Negri and Hardt that the capitalist schemata

of valorization are failing? No, we are not experiencing the decline of capitalist

schematization, we are experiencing its proliferation. Thus the notion of informational

accumulation, insofar as it is considered the mechanism by which capitalist

valorization takes place, must be replaced by the notions of information-power and

its exploitation.

There is, however, one last concept that Hardt and Negri have only recently

begun to make use of that may perhaps reunite their conceptual framework with our

ownthe concept of biopolitical exploitation. According to Dyer-Witheford, Hardt


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and Negri turn to the Foucauldian concept of biopolitics to present a more somatic

conception of production, one supposedly more considerate of all the important

forms of labor that fall outside the realm of the cyborg immaterial laborer.35 Their

success on this front is debatable, but what is immediately relevant to the project at

hand is that, by the time they release Commonwealth, their theoretical shift from

informatized production to biopolitical production has resulted in the reintroduction

of a new form of exploitation. Clearly, though, this new concept remains within the

same conceptual family when they write, Capitalist accumulation today is

increasingly external to the production process, such that exploitation takes the form

ofexpropriation of the common.36 Hence the emphasis remains the same, focusing on

the way accumulation is positioned outside of the productive process; yet the target

seems to have changed. The sights of capitalist accumulation are now set upon the

common rather than on information or the general intellect. One potential reason

for this shift is that informational accumulation, since it proceeds from a reified

conception of information, ultimately expresses the expropriation of dead labor or

existing wealth, whereas Negri and Hardt profess quite adamantly here that

...political economists (and the critics of political economy) should not be satisfied

with accounts of neoliberalism that pose capitalist accumulation as merely or

primarily the expropriation of existing wealth. Capital is and has to be in its essence

aproductivesystem that generates wealth through the labor-power it employs and

exploits.37 So in order to analyze ...both the product of labor and the means of

future production Hardt and Negri turn to the exploitation of biopolitical labor.38


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Negri and Hardt do, however, retain a strong fidelity to their earlier work

throughout this theoretical turn to biopolitical exploitation. The concept is premised,

in a tenaciously insistent manner, upon productive processes of cooperation being

located outside the sphere of work. Indeed this externality of cooperation becomes

central to the accumulation process:

...rather than providing cooperation, we could even say that capital expropriatescooperation as

a central element of exploiting biopolitical labor-power. This expropriation takes place not somuch from the individual worker (because cooperation already implies a collectivity) butmore clearly from the field of social labor, operating on the level of information flows,communication networks, social codes, linguistic innovations, and practices of affects andpassions. Biopolitical exploitation involves the expropriation of the common, in this way, atthe level of social production and social practice.39

While this passage is not thematically much different from their understanding of

informational accumulation, the expropriation of cooperation and the common

(unlike the expropriation of reified-information) corresponds to an understanding of

information-as-production, and hence resonates nicely with the concept of living

labor (as well as with our premise that information-power is inseparable from its

emergent signification as a participatory system of cooperation).

Even more importantly, though, the turn to expropriation of cooperation

begins to focus their investigation on a somewhat clearersiteof exploitation, as we

observe in their commentary on the renewed primacy of rent:

...in the contemporary networks of bio-political production, the extraction of value from thecommon is increasingly accomplished without the capitalist intervening in its production.This renewed primacy of rent provides us an essential insight into why finance capital, alongwith the vast stratum that Keynes denigrates as functionless investors, occupies today a

central position in the management of capitalist accumulation, capturing and expropriatingthe value created at a level far abstracted from the labor process.40

So if biopolitical exploitation is the exploitation of the common, cooperative,

reproductive processes of social life (or of the psychosocial), then it seems Negri and

Hardt are suggesting here that the extraction of value from these processes functions


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through that specific apparatus of capture known as rent. And while their point is

well taken, they do seem to be using the concept of rent in a slightly hyperbolic

manner as a stand-in for all payments made to any capitalist external to the

production process (including investors, creditors, tax collectors, and the like).

Hence, the apparatus of capture might be more rigorously identified in the vast

series of metrics and taxonomies such capitalist employ to ensure returns on their

investmentsliteral rent being one of them, labor time being another, and so on.

Perhaps, though, the best way to communicate the conceptual cousinhood of

biopolitical exploitation and the exploitation of information-power would be to

address them as two similar but distinct accounts of subsumption. Negri and Hardt

hold that [i]n the biopolitical context capital might be said to subsume not just labor

but society as a whole or, really, social life itself, since life is both what is put to work

in biopolitical production and what is produced.41 They mean then that biopolitical

exploitation is an expression of the ultimate form of real subsumption, where not

only has laborbeen completely integrated into the capitalist body, but the forms of

social life itselfare put to work in the process of capitalist valorization. Of course this

subsumption is coupled with the assertion that [r]ather than an organ functioning

within the capitalist body, biopolitical labor-power is becoming more and more

autonomous, with capital simply hovering over it parasitically with its disciplinary

regimes, apparatuses of capture, mechanisms of expropriation, financial networks,

and the like.42 Counter to this, if we follow through the hypothesis of the

exploitation of information-power, we must insist that we are experiencing a

subsumption of labor that is not properly real, nor properly formal, but rather a kind


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of in-formational subsumption. That is to say, the particular labor activities that we

are concerned with here cannot be considered to exist a priori(prior) to capitals

disciplinary apparatus and production processes, nor can they be considered exactly

a posteriori(subsequent) inventions of new capitalist forms of labor; rather they are

the particular labor activities that are curiously a prasenti(contemporaneous) to their

subsumption. That is to say, in this understanding of exploitation, information-

power (unlike biopolitical labor-power) remains at the service of the capitalist body,

but only insofar as it is employed toproducemechanisms of expropriation, financial

networks, systems of evaluation, classes of accreditation, and the like.

Ultimately then the revolution of the Information Age presents itself as less an

economic revolution than as a political one. The informatized mode ofproduction

largely remains the same as it was in industrialization insofar as the wealth of

material goods remains produced in much the same fashion. Yet increasingly

politics, government, and community are subsumed into the capitalist enterprise,

constituting a shift in our mode ofinformation. This new subsumption occurs through

the buying of information-power, whose actualization can provide the capitalist with

a slew of favorable effects (e.g., positive brand associations, improved efficiency in

the production process, the creation of new markets), but the most important is the

production and reproduction of validation found in the internalized and

individualizing systems of measure utilized by capitalist schematization. In Time for

Revolution, Negri actually writes a passage that resonates strongly with this

understanding of informatization as a political rather than economic rupture:

In postmodernity, what we call surplus-value in the economy of modernity is no longersimply the extortion of labour (beyond the value necessary for its reproduction, which ismodified in all cases). In postmodernity, surplus-value is above all a blockage of the teleology


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of the common, that is, it is the attempt to render it tautological and to render the commonname of the common meaningless. What in the economy of modernity is called exploitationis, in postmodernity, defined by the barriers set up against the attempt, by the poor, to pass

beyond the limit of being by means of the immeasurable. Exploitation is deflation; it is athwarting and a reduction to measure of the power of biopolitics open to the to-come.43

Negri could not be more correct here, but the ultimate aim of our project has been to

stress that analysis of informatized production, the Information Age,

postmodernization, and the like must address what exactly these barriers to the

immeasurable consist of, particularly if it attempts to move from an analysis of

exploitation to a politics of emancipation. Informations common reified

conceptionin its privileged social, political, and economic unityobscures these

barriers, these metrics and taxonomies, by approaching information transcendentally

as always-already constituted, completed, and given. In proposing, via Simondon, an

alternate socioepistemic ontology of informativity and information-as-production we

find a new path by which to discuss the exploitation of cooperation in the

Information Age. It is a path that, unlike Negri and Hardts, does not require a

Foucauldian detour through the concept of biopolitics, and yet still manages to stress

labors autonomy insofar as these barriers to the immeasurable are revealed to be

always of our own, collective, cooperative construction. So finally we offer two

theses to any who might follow this path in future investigation of informatized

production and the exploitation through which it functions.


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Act Three: Two Theses

Thesis 1:

Information functionsontogenetically as well as economicallyas the productive

activity of psychosocial individuation.

Information functions as neither a product nor a commodity; it isproductive but,

unlike classical labor, productive ofsignification rather than utility, sign-value rather

than use-value or exchange-value. As such, information functions economically

through the construction of new metrics and taxonomies(e.g., grades, analytics, credit

scores, statistics, accreditations, demographics, consumer ratings, licenses, etc.), and

theindividualization catalysis ofmetastability internalization (e.g., the dramatic behavioral

shifts of poor students, the opportunism of the freelancer, etc.). Understood in this

way, analyzing information in terms of accumulation and exchange no longer makes

sense, rather it must be analyzed energetically and schematically in terms of the

techniques utilized toorganize transindividual relations into fields of participation. That is to

say, we must analyze how the transindividual relations that resolve our internalized

metastability (and thus inform us)e.g., the transferred/ostracized students

discovery of a math team, the patriots military enlistment, or the dispossessed/idle

farmers turn to migrant wage-laborbecome organized into schemas weparticipate

in (competitive ranking schemes, chains of command, and labor time). Thus the

extent to which information is analyzed economicallyi.e., the extent to which it is

analyzed as a commodityis more adequately discussed in terms of information-

power, or the capacity to inform.


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Thesis 2:

The exploitation of information-power, much like biopolitical exploitation,

corresponds to the contemporary exploitation of psychosocial cooperation.

The concept of information-power denotes ones capacity to inform, and this is

precisely what one brings to the market to sell (rather than the actual activity of

information as such, or some sort of reified information-product). As such, the

buying and selling of information-power may sound superficially much like buying

and selling of generic human capacities in the form of immaterial labor, but the

capacity to inform consists of the specific ability to simultaneously construct (or

reconstruct) systems of measure/classification and to promote individualization

through them. Hence, the capacity to inform may be more readily understood as the

capacity to controlas capitalist enterprise employs this capacity in the construction and

enforcement of metrics that control cooperative/participatory systems of

individualization such that they further the process of subsumption. The exploitation

of information-power becomes, then, the technique of creating surplus-value via the

expropriation of psychosocial cooperation systems, which is precisely the same technique

outlined in the Autonomist understanding of biopolitical exploitation.

However, their base concept of immaterial labor is another matter entirely.

The immaterial labor hypothesis presumes a self-valorizing form of labor that

organizes itself into productive networks that cooperate autonomously of capitals

command (thus reducing capitalist enterprise to a merely parasitic form, to an

apparatus of capture). Yet as a productive resource cooperation is here divorced

from its particular instantiations, divorced from the manipulation and proliferation


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of itsspecificsystems of measure and classification, to instead be analyzed in terms of

a complex linguistic, cognitive, communicative jumble of facultiesageneral

intellect. This distinction is what separates our concepts of information and

information-power from the concept of immaterial labor. For while the advent of

immaterial labor supposedly topples the law of value, it remains unclear how exactly

parasitic capital siphons off the autonomous self-valorization of those immaterial

laborers who work on and through a general intellect.

So instead of proposing this siphoning process, instead of proposing a process

of informational accumulation, we propose a process of informationalsubsumption.

This proposition posits the exploitation of information-power as an exploitation of

living labor; specifically the living labor employed in the production of metrics and

taxonomies that both obscure and further capitals expropriation and privatization of

the commons productivity, of psychosocial cooperation. The exploitation of

information-power thus constitutes a process that foregrounds the disparation of

individuals (which come into communication only through capitals appropriated

schemas), and obscures the labor of information (by presenting it as an always-

already constituted product rather than as a production). As such, when exploited,

this labor of information is employed in the production of the very schemas that

further the process of capitalist subsumption. The end of history, the deflation of

biopolitics open to the to-come, capitalist realismthese are the names we give the

exploitation of information-power, and the subsumption it extends. For though this

new mode of exploitation constitutes nothing more than the reification of

information, it constitutes nothing less than the exploitation of individuation itself.


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Notes

Acronyms

IG Simondon, Gilbert. The Genesis of the Individual.Incorporations. Ed.

Jonathan Crary & Sanford Kwinter. New York: Zone Books, 1992. 297319.

TP Toscano, Alberto. The Theatre of Production. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,

2006.

E Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri.Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University

Press, 2000.

CW Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth. Cambridge: Belknap

Press of Harvard University Press, 2009

Act One: Information Theory

1 G Simondon. The Genesis of the Individual. Incorporation. Zone Books, 1992. 297. HereafterIG.

2G. Deleuze. On Gilbert Simondon.Desert Islands and Other Texts. Ed. David Lapoujade. Trans.Michael Taormina. New York: Semiotext(e), 2004. 86.

3 IG, 300.4 IG, 301-302. Individuation has resisted thought and description until now because we have

recognized only one form of equilibrium: stable equilibrium. The idea of metastable equilibriumhad not been recognized. A being was implicitly presumed to be in a state of stable equilibrium atall times. Stable equilibrium excludes the idea of becoming because it corresponds to the lowestlevel of potential energy possible; it is the sort of equilibrium that is attained in a system when allthe possible transformations have been achieved and no other force remains to enact any furtherchanges. With all the potentials actualized, and the system having reached its lowest energy level,it can no longer go through any more transformations. The ancients recognized only the states ofinstability and stability, movement and rest, but they had no clear objective idea of metastability.In order to define metastability, it is necessary to introduce the notion of order and that of an

increase in entropy.5 IG, 304.6 Preindividual being is one of Simondons concepts that has garnered quite a lot of attention

recently. Alberto Toscano offers this insightful description, Unlike a structured grid ofpossibilities (or even a physical state space) prefiguring or determining the individuations thatdraw their norm from it, a preindividual field is constituted as a determinable domain, in whichdifferences and incompatibilities function as the potentials that a germ of information can resolveand modulate. (A. Toscano. The Theatre of Production, 155. Hereafter referred to as TP.)

7 IG, 304-305.


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8 IG, 305.9 IG, 30610 IG, 307.11 Muriel Combes writes of transindividual relations: ...the transindividual appears as that which

unifies, not the individual and society, but a relation interior to the individual (that which defines

psychism) and an exterior relation (that which defines the collective): the transindividual istherefore a relation of relations. (Combes, Muriel. Simondon Individu et Collectivit: Pour unephilosophie du transindividual. Trans. Jason Read. 46.)

12 As Simondon puts it: A relation must be understood in its role as a relation in the context ofbeing itself, a relation belonging to the being, that is, a way of being and not simply a connectionbetween two terms that could be adequately comprehended using concepts because they bothenjoy what amounts to an independent existence. (IG, 312.)

13 IG, 307-309.14 IG, 309.15 IG, 310.16 IG, 310-311.17 TP, 143-144.18 TP, 145.19 TP, 142 Toscano points out that One of the principal notions Deleuze derives from Simondon is

that of the individual as a signal-sign system. A signal denotes the existence of at least twoheterogeneous series or domains, conceived as a precondition of individuation. A sign is theproduction of a communication, or compatibility, between these heterogeneities.

20 TP, 150.

Act Two: Information Revolution

21 Here we are starting with the assertions of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt that, after the workof Daniel Bell and Alain Touraine, It has now become common to view the succession ofeconomic paradigms since the Middle Ages in three distinct moments, each defined by thedominant sector of the economy: a first paradigm in which agriculture and the extraction of rawmaterials dominated the economy, a second in which industry and the manufacture of durablegoods occupied the privileged position, and a third and current paradigm in which providingservices and manipulating information are at the heart of economic production. (M.Hardt andA. Negri.Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.298. Hereafter referred to as E.)Though this is no doubt a problematic assertionwith its invocation of a kind of lurking,somewhat Hegelian, technogeistwe begin with it here to move beyond it; as there is nothingmore recognizable in regards to information than the common discursive tendency to associate itwith the economies of brave new worlds.

22 In short, this refers to an economic paradigm wherein ...industrial production is no longerexpanding its dominance over other economic forms and social phenomena. A symptom of thisshift is manifest in the quantitative changes in employment. Whereas the process ofmodernization was indicated by a migration of labor from agriculture and mining (the primarysector) to industry (the secondary), the process of postmodernization or informatization has beendemonstrated through the migration from industry to service jobs (the tertiary), a shift that hastaken place in the dominant capitalist countries, and particularly in the United States, since the

early 1970s. Services cover a wide range of activities from health care, education, and finance totransportation, entertainment, and advertising. The jobs for the most part are highly mobile andinvolve flexible skills. More important, they are characterized in general by the central role played

by knowledge, information, affect, and communication. In this sense many call the postindustrialeconomy an informational economy. (E, 303.)

23 E, 285-286.24 M. Hardt and P. Virno eds. Radical Thought in Italy. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota

Press, 1996. 262.


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25 M. Hardt and A. Negri.Labor of Dionysus. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,

1994. 282.26 N. Dyer-Witheford. Cyber-Negri: General Intellect and Immaterial Labor. Eds.Timothy S.

Murphy and Abdul-Karim Mustapha. London: Pluto Press, 2005. 149.27 N. Dyer-Witheford, 149.28

N. Dyer-Witheford, 143.29 A. Negri. Lesson 2: On Social Ontology.Reflections on Empire. Trans. Ed Emery. Cambridge,

UK: Polity Press, 2008. 64.30 A. Negri, Lesson 2, 65.31 E, 257.32 E, 258.33 E, 258-259.34 A. Negri, Lesson 2, 76.35 N. Dyer-Witheford, 152.36 M. Hardt and A. Negri. Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University

Press, 2009. 137. Hereafter referred to as CW.37 CW, 138-139.38 CW, 139.39

CW, 140-141.40 CW, 141-142.41 CW, 142.42 CW, 142.43 A. Negri. Time for Revolution. Trans. Matteo Mandarini. London, UK: Continuum, 2003. 233.


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References

Deleuze, Gilles. On Gilbert Simondon.Desert Islands and Other Texts. Ed. David

Lapoujade. Trans. Michael Taormina. New York: Semiotext(e), 2004.

Dyer-Witheford, Nick. Cyber-Negri: General Intellect and Immaterial Labor.

Eds.Timothy S. Murphy and Abdul-Karim Mustapha. London: Pluto Press,

2005. 136-162.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press

of Harvard University Press, 2009.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri.Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 2000.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri.Labor of Dionysus. Minneapolis, MN: University

of Minnesota Press, 1994.

Hardt, Michael, and Paolo Virno eds.Radical Thought in Italy. Minneapolis, MN:

University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Negri, Antonio. Lesson 2: On Social Ontology.Reflections on Empire. Trans. Ed

Emery. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2008. 60-78.

Negri, Antonio. Time for Revolution. Trans. Matteo Mandarini. London, UK:

Continuum, 2003.

Simondon, Gilbert. The Genesis of the Individual.Incorporations. Ed. Jonathan

Crary and Sanford Kwinter. Trans. Mark Cohen and Sanford Kwinter. New

York: Zone Books, 1992. 297319.

The Exploitation of Individuation

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Transcript of The Exploitation of Individuation