j - wikström - artistic labour - under - advanced - capitalism

Artistic Labour Under Advanced

Capitalism

Josefine Wikström

M00273686

Dissertation

MA in Aesthetics and Art Theory

September 2010 Middlesex University

Supervised by Peter Osborne 14865 words

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ABSTRACT Post-Workerists’ claim that post-industrial labour-forms are creative although deeply

entwined in a capitalist mode of production puts the idea of artistic labour into crisis.

This dissertation is an attempt to investigate what implications the post-Workerist

mode of looking at labour today have for the concept of artistic labour in the 21st

century. It explores the idea that Post-Fordist labour-forms have an inherent creative

potential and therefore dissolves into artistic labour. It does this by looking at

Antonio Negri’s interpretation of Karl Marx’s term the ‘general intellect’ found in the

Grundrisse. The dissertation claims that Negri’s conception of the ‘general intellect’

is based on the wrongly made assumption that capitalism has an end point. It further

claims that this undermines Negri’s idea that post-Fordistic labour is creative and

instead shows that it is the opposite to creative labour, namely real subsumed labour.

This leads to the conclusion of the paper which is that it is necessary to distinguish

artistic labour from productive labour.

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CONTENTS Introduction 1. Productive Labour in Marx 2.1. Another Ontology of Productivity 2.2. The Logic of Limitlessness: Capital's Capacity for Expansion 3. Artistic Labour’s Capacity for Transforming Alienated Labour

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INTRODUCTION In the 1990’s, Italian autonomism was recuperated and radicalised. The emphasis on

workers’ autonomy and subjectivity was again considered vital for workers’

emancipation from the capitalist mode of production. As in the 1960’s and 1970’s,

the focus was anew on workers’ self-valorisation and the creative aspect of labour.

Michael Hardt points out that the main slogan of the first stage of the autonomia

movement in the early 1960’s, “refusal of work”1 did not mean “a refusal of creative

or productive activity but rather a refusal of work within the established capitalist

relations of production.”2 This refusal of work took place within the production

process itself, in forms of sabotage of the production process, such as the slowing

down and counter use of machinery.

Contemporary autonomists agree that the struggle against the capitalist mode

of production should take place within the labour process. However, what crucially

differentiates them from earlier autonomists is that they believe that contemporary

forms of labour, which have developed with advanced capitalism, have an immanent

potential for workers’ self-valorisation and thus subjectivity and autonomy. Writers

such as Antonio Negri, Paulo Virno and Maurizio Lazzarato therefore see a huge

potential in these new forms of labour that have emerged with the contemporary

economy, such as those performed in the communication-, entertainment- and

information-industries, which have been termed ‘immaterial labour’ by Maurizio

Lazzarato.3. They argue that the potential in these labours lies in the fact that they

require co-operational skills, knowledge and creative subjectivities, which therefore

bring a creative aspect to the labour process. With these new forms of labour, the

production of commodities and the reproduction of life are merged together and

productive labour, therefore, becomes creative and emancipatory as well as

subsuming and alienating.

Crucial within these writings is the concept of the ‘general intellect’, which is

taken from a section known as the “Fragment on Machines” in Karl Marx’s

1 Michael Hardt, introduction to Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Paulo Virno and Michael Hardt

(Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 1996), 2.

2 Hardt, introduction, 2.

3 Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labour,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Paulo Virno and Michael

Hardt (Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 1996), 132-146.

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Grundrisse. Also sometimes termed ‘mass intellectuality’, it proposes that the

increased exchange of knowledge, co-operational and communicational skills within

the new forms of labour developed in advanced capitalism, produces a collective and

creative intellect governed by the workers. So, in these writings, the ‘general

intellect’ becomes an expression for a communist society in which emancipated

labour is produced and exchanged creatively.

The contemporary autonomists’ account of productive labour as creative,

emancipatory and thus as the reproduction of life, leaves the question of artistic

labour hanging. Some would argue that the role of artists since early modernism has

been to criticise the capitalist form of value and its labour-processes. Movements

such as Constructivism, Surrealism and Bauhaus, and artists such as Marcel

Duchamp and Andy Warhol, all imply a harsh critique of the capitalist mode of

production within their practices. If that critique is now supposed to be found in all

forms of labour processes – although mainly within the creative, entertainment and

communication industries – how does artistic labour fit into this? It is within this

broad context that I would like to ask: How can we understand artistic labour under

advanced capitalism?

There is no easy and obvious way to investigate the concept of artistic labour

today. The two main and overall questions I want to ask are firstly: Does artistic

labour differentiate itself ontologically from productive labour? And secondly, is it

necessary for artistic labour to differentiate itself ontologically from productive

labour in order to function critically? To answer these questions I want to look at

three very different, although interconnected, traditions of thinking. Firstly, Marx’s

account of productive labour, secondly, Negri’s account of both productive and

artistic labour, and thirdly, John Roberts’ post-Adornian concept of artistic labour.

At the heart of contemporary autonomists’ appropriation of Marx’s term

‘general intellect’, lies an account of productivity conceived, as I have already

mentioned, not only as the production of commodities, but also as the reproduction of

subjectivities and thus of life in a broader sense. The most developed analysis of the

‘general intellect’ is done by Antonio Negri in Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the

Grundrisse, and, more specifically, in Chapter Seven: “The Theory of the Wage and

Its Developments”, of that book in which he analyses the “Fragment on Machines.” I

will therefore take Negri’s analysis of the “Fragment on Machines” as the point of

departure and main focus for my analysis. The questions I want to ask in this section

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of my thesis are: What is Negri’s account of productive labour? On what assumptions

does he base that account? And what are the implications of his definition of

productive labour for the concept of artistic labour? The main argument I want to

bring forth in this section is that Negri’s reading of the “Fragment on Machines” is

based on the idea that capitalism would reach a culmination or a limit. My claim is

that Marx’s short investigation into developed machinery is the exposition of

precisely the opposite of that, namely capital’s capacity to continuously expand itself.

In order to understand how Negri’s concept of productivity differentiates itself

from Marx’s I will first look into Marx’s concept of productive labour in detail. The

overall question I want to ask in my investigation of Marx’s concept of productive

labour is: What is Marx’s concept of productive labour and how does it relate itself to

non-material forms of labour such as service- and artistic labours? My main claim is

that Marx does not differentiate non-material labours ontologically from productive

labour.

As a counter reading to Negri I will then examine Roberts’ post-Adornian

account of artistic labour as the potential site for a transformation of alienated labour,

through what he calls a process of deskilling and reskilling. Roberts articulates how

artistic labour, through its ability of transforming its materials and therefore escape

the law of value and the technical division of labour, can transform productive

alienated labour into non-alienated labour. My aim with this final chapter is to expose

an account in which artistic labour achieves its transformative potenital of productive

labour by firmly distinguishing itself from productive labour.

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1. PRODUCTIVE LABOUR IN MARX

Marx’s definition of productive labour is crucial for my investigation of artistic

labour under advanced capitalism. Firstly, because it provides a basis for

understanding artistic labour in relation to the theory of value, that is, its relation to

the logic of capital. Secondly, because Negri’s notion of ‘self-valorisation’ – which I

have used in my analysis – is founded on an expanded, radicalized and inverted

version of Marx’s concept of productive labour. In order to illuminate Negri’s

operation in relation to Marx’s concept, as well as to open up possibilities for a

broader understanding of artistic labour, I will look at Marx’s concept of productive

labour in detail.

In Capital, Vol. I (Chapter Seven: “The Labour Process and the Valorisation

Process”), Marx gives a general account of productive labour independent from

historical conditions, as the process in which human man creatively interacts with

nature and makes tools he needs by using his whole body and all the powers of his

mind. Labour appears here as a natural, creative and essential process between man

and the nature around him. Marx defines this process, not merely as ‘labour’, but as

‘productive labour’. “If we look at the whole process from the point of view of its

result, the product, it is plain that both instruments and the object of labour are means

of production and that the labour itself is productive labour.”4

A more specified distinction of productive labour appears further into the

same volume of Capital (Chapter Sixteen: “Absolute and Relative Surplus-Value”),

where Marx states that his earlier definition is incapable of giving an account of

productive labour under the specific form of capitalistic production. Merely to

produce is no longer enough. Within the logic of capitalism, labour is only productive

if it produces surplus value.5 The same applies to the productive worker. “The only

worker who is productive is one who produces surplus-value for the capitalist, or in

4 C, 287.

5 Marx defines the production of surplus value as specific for the capitalist mode of production and something based on the

exploitation of workers. Surplus value appears when the workers labour more than necessary for their means of reproduction.

“The prolongation of the working day beyond the point at which the worker would have produced an exact equivalent for the

value of his labour-power, and the appropriation of that surplus labour by capital – this is the process which constitutes the

production of absolute surplus-value.” C,645.

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other words contributes towards the self-valorisation of capital.”6 Important here is

Marx’s emphasis on capital’s indifference to the nature of the production process as

such.

“If we may take an example from outside the sphere of material production, a

school master is a productive worker when, in addition to belabouring the heads

of his pupils, he works himself into the ground to enrich the owner of the school.

That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of a sausage

factory, make no difference to the relation.”7

We can therefore conclude that the production of surplus value according to Marx not

is connected to the content of the labour. It is solely dependent on the social relations

under which it is produced. Productive labour implies “a specifically social relation

of production.”8 Defined as a social relation, productive labour can only be defined as

such if workers are employed by a capitalist – who for free achieves the surplus-

value.

In the Appendix (an early draft of Capital, first time published in 1939 after

Marx’s death) entitled “Results of the Immediate Process of Production,” we find an

account of productive and unproductive labour almost identical to the one outlined in

Chapter Seven and Sixteen. Productive labour is that which produces surplus value,

i.e. “it is productive if it is realized in a surplus-value without any equivalent for the

worker.”9 Whether a labour-process is productive or not is therefore “utterly

unconnected with the specific content of the labour, with its particular utility or the

use-value in which it is objectified. Hence the labour with the same content can be

either productive or unproductive.”10 However, there is a difference between the

account of productive labour in the Appendix and the account in the earlier

mentioned chapters: the Appendix includes an expanded exploration of productive

labour in non-material forms, such as service-labours and different forms of artistic

labour. This discussion takes off with the distinction between wage-labour and

productive labour. A wage-labourer, writes Marx, is someone who sells his labour-

6 C, 644.

7 C, 644.

8 C, 644.

9 CA, 1039.

10 CA, 1044.

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power in exchange for money. The same wage-labourer becomes productive only if

his labour-power gets fully “incorporated in the capitalist process of production.”11 So

only when workers are part of the production process as living capital can they

produce surplus value. Wage-labourers are not, therefore, necessarily productive

labourers. Productive labourers, on the other hand, always have to be wage-labourers,

according to Marx.

Marx claims that under the developed form of capitalism all products of

labour – both material and non-material – turn into commodities and all workers into

wage-labourers. This makes it complex to distinguish between wage-labour and

productive labour. The danger, Marx claims, is on the one hand to assume that all

wage-labour is productive and on the other hand, to categorize all productive labour

as wage-labour because they might share the same characteristics. It is therefore

important, Marx emphasises, not to forget that the productive character of labour has

nothing to do with the content but only with the social relation between the buyer and

seller of labour-power. “A soldier is a wage-labourer, a mercenary, but this does not

make a productive worker of him.”12

Despite the complexity of distinguishing productive labour from wage-labour,

Marx firmly holds to the position that productive labour is to do with a social relation,

not the content of the labour. He shows this with three examples. These examples are

important, firstly, because they affirm the indifference of the content of labour.

Secondly, they are to be seen as the exposition of the passage from ‘formal’ to ‘real’

subsumption, a distinction made by Marx and which I will discuss futher on. Finally,

these examples are important because they are dominated by what could be

categorised as artistic labour.

The first example is Milton – the author of Paradise Lost – who, Marx claims,

was an unproductive writer because he produced it “as a silkworm produces silk, as

the activation of his own nature.”13 An author who writes regularly for a publisher in a

factory-style is on the other hand, a productive worker. The second example is that of

a singer. A singer who sings like a bird is simply an unproductive worker. A singer

who sings for money is a wage-labourer. And a singer who is employed by an

entrepreneur to sing is a productive worker. The third and last example is the

11 CA,1041.

12 CA, 1042.

13 CA, 1044.

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profession of teaching, in which Marx states that a teacher “who instructs others is

not a productive worker. But a schoolmaster who works for wages in an institution

along with others, using his own labour to increase the money of the entrepreneur

who owns the knowledge-mongering institution, is a productive worker.”14

Despite the fact that these three examples clearly affirm the definition of

productive labour as a specific social relation between the producer and the purchaser

of labour-power, Marx concludes that these types of work do not need to be

considered other than as wage-labours and therefore not productive. What appears as

a fundamental contradiction here in Marx is, however, simply to do with that these

labours constitute such a small part of the production in capitalism as a whole.

“But for the most part, work of this sort has scarcely reached the stage of being

subsumed even formally under capital, and belongs essentially to a transitional stage. On

the whole, types of work that are consumed as services and not in products separable

form the worker and hence not capable of existing as commodities independently of him,

but which are yet capable of being directly exploited in capitalist terms, are of

microscopic significance when compared with the mass of capitalist production. They

may be entirely neglected, therefore, and can be dealt with under the category of wage-

labour that is not at the same time productive labour.”15

Marx distinguishes between two forms of non-material labour. The first one is

processes of production where the products are possible to divide from the labour-

process. This would include, for example, the production of paintings and books. In

these production processes the “capitalist production is possible only within very

narrow limits.”16 Even artists or booksellers who employ assistants are only possible

of producing capital in a formal sense. The second form is products individisible from

the act of producing, in which the “capitalist mode of production occurs only on a

limited scale.”17 It is important to note that even in these unusual production processes

the definition of productive labour is still a social relation.

Marx’s account of artistic labour is, as John Roberts correctly points out, very limited

14 CA, 1044.

15 CA, 1044-1045.

16 CA, 1048.

17 CA, 1048.

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as Marx only mentions a “small number of particular artists.”18 I would however

argue that we can conclude that Marx does not distinguish artistic labour – or any

other non-material form of labour – ontologically from productive labour. Non-

material labour, artistic labour included, has the capacity, or runs the risk – depending

on how you see it, as any other type of labour, to produce surplus-value. We have,

however, seen that Marx tends to remove artistic labour from the category of

productive labour. It can therefore seem as if he claims two things at once: on the one

hand, that productive labour is a social relation indifferent to the content of the labour

as such; and on the other, that non-material labours such as artistic labours should not

be included within the capitalist production, as the wealth it contributes to capitalism,

as a whole is minimal. Is this seeming contradiction a more fundamental claim about

so-called non-material labours? And what does it say about artistic labour?

FORMAL AND REAL SUBSUMPTION When Marx writes that we don’t need to consider non-material labours such as

artistic labours, as productive labour, it is a quantitative, not a qualitative issue. By

that I mean that non-material labours such as teaching and painting were in Marx’s

time of “microscopic significance”19 for the economy as a whole. This was not

dependent on the nature of these forms of labour, but on the proportion of the

economy that they took up. The apparent contradiction in Marx’s account of whether

or not non-material forms of labour are productive is therefore, I would suggest, to do

with the historical and logical development of capitalism. To fully understand the

development of capitalism, in relation to productive labour, we must therefore

connect it to Marx’s distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘real’ subumption of labour.

Marx makes the distinction between formal and real subsumption of labour to capital

in the Appendix to Capital, already mentioned. This distinction is crucial to

understand Marx’s definition of productive labour in relation to non-material labours

such as artistic labour.

The formal subsumption of labour, Marx explains, is the “general form of

every capitalist process of production”20 and is only “formally distinct from earlier

18 IoF, 28.

19 CA, 1048.

20 CA, 1019.

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modes of production.”21 It is, in other words, the appropriation by capital of already

existing forms of labour, invented before capital. For example, under formal

subsumption the guild master and his apprentices are replaced with the capitalist and

the wage-labourer. In the same way, the farmer who before produced for his family,

now – with the same production – becomes a productive wage-labourer governed by

the capitalist. As the examples show, the formal subsumption of labour to capital

does not involve any technological changes within the actual labour process. What

changes is only the speed and scale of production, which becomes more continuous

and bigger than in earlier production processes. They therefore only imply, what

Marx calls, “gradual consequences”22 for the process of production.

Formal subsumption is further distinguished by Marx as the production of

absolute surplus value, which it is only possible to increase through lengthening the

working day. “In the formal subsumption of labour under capital, this is the sole

manner of producing surplus-value.”23 Capital can however not expand significantly

as long as it sticks to this relation because “it is based on small capitalists who differ

only slightly from the workers in their education and their activities.”24 Since the

changes under the formal subsumption of labour are only gradual, qualitative

differences between different labours do still exist under this form of production.

Real subsumption of labour, Marx continues, is a developed form of formal

subsumption, and, more importantly, is the “specifically capitalist mode of

production.”25 In opposition to the formal subsumption of labour, the change in the

labour process is now, not only quantitative and gradual, but qualitative. In the real

subsumption of labour, it is not merely individual parts of the production that change,

the real subsumption “revolutionizes their actual mode of labour and the real nature

of the labour process as a whole.”26

Under the fully developed capitalist form, i.e. the real subsumption of labour,

the production process is characterised by large-scale machinery requiring advanced

technological and scientific developments. All forces of society are therefore

subsumed into the labour process, which is “the transformation of production by the

21 CA, 1025.

22 CA, 1021.

23 CA, 1021.

24 CA, 1027.

25 CA, 1021.

26 CA, 1021.

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conscious use of the sciences, of mechanics, chemistry, etc. for specific ends,

technology, etc. and similarly, through the enormous increase of scale responding to

such developments.”27 Under the real subsumption of labour to capital, all social

forces in society are needed for the development of the production processes. In this

stage of capitalism, living labour is therefore directly subsumed to capital.

The real subsumption of labour, is further characterized by it producing

relative surplus value. As Chapter Eleven in Capital Vol. I shows, relative surplus

value can only grow through an increase in the intensity of production, i.e. in a

reduction of necessary labour. This reduction of necessary labour is realised when

technological and scientific developments make the time for the production of each

commodity shorter, in order to produce more and on a larger scale.

It is only with the distinction between real and formal subsumption of labour

to capital that we can understand why Marx seems to remove non-material labourers

such as waiters and artists from the realm of productive labour. Non-material

labourers, including artists, were in Marx’s time of insignificant proportion, in

relation to the entire production in society. Today, on the opposite, they are largely

recognised as constituting a major part of the economy and therefore, I claim, cannot

be neglected.

PRODUCTIVE AND CIRCULATING CAPITAL In the Grundrisse, which, like the Appendix, was also published after Marx’s death,

productive labour is defined as a social relation. However, we also find here an

expanded discussion of the concept of productive labour in relation to circulation.

In a footnote – used by Negri, in Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the

Grundrisse, in order to criticise Marx’s definition of productive labour – Marx claims

that labours not directly producing capital cannot be defined as productive labour. It

is obvious that workers who smoke tobacco, rather than producing it, not are

productive. However, the other examples given by Marx of non-productive workers

are those who provide services or artistic forms of labour. In a similar manner to the

sections already described in Capital, Marx seems to remove all non-material

labourers from the category of productive labour. The reason, Marx argues, is that

there is only a simple exchange in these sorts of labours, meaning that they belong

27 CA,1024.

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only to the sphere of circulation, which makes them incapable of producing capital.

“The same relation holds for all services which workers exchange directly for the

money of other persons, and which are consumed by these persons. This is

consumption of revenue, which, as such, always falls within simple circulation; it

is not consumption of capital.”28

Similar to the cases where Marx seemed to exclude non-material labours from

the realm of productive labour because of the minimal proportion they take up in

capitalist production, and which I discussed earlier, his claim that labours existing in

the sphere of circulation are incapable of producing surplus-value, must also, I claim,

be considered in relation to the distinction between formal and real subsumption.

Non-material labours do today, as already mentioned, make up a significant

proportion of the world economy. We must however also, in order to understand his

condemnation of labours existing in the sphere of circulation, look at his conception

of the realisation of value.

Marx separates the process of production from circulation by defining the first

as the site of surplus value and the second, as the circulation of it. The circulation is

however crucial for the realization of the surplus value produced in the production

process. In Chapter Four of Capital Vol I Marx claims: “[t]he circulation of

commodities is the starting point of capital.”29 He does so by distinguishing between

two sorts of circulation. Simple circulation is when a commodity is sold for money

only in order to buy another commodity. No money is therefore expended but “spent

once and for all.”30 However, in the circulation specific to capitalism, a commodity is

bought for money in order to be sold again for a higher price. The money in this

process of circulation is therefore “not spent, it is merely advanced.”31

“Withdrawn from circulation, it [capital] is petrified into a hoard, and it could

remain in that position until the Last Judgment without a single farthing accruing

it. […] As against this, the circulation of money as capital is an end in itself, for

the valorisation of value takes place within this constantly renewed movement.”32

28 GR,272.

29 C, 247.

30 C, 249.

31 C, 249.

32 C, 252-253.

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Despite the fact that the ‘realisation’ of capital in itself is not ‘productive’ of surplus-

value, the self-valorisation of capital is nonetheless dependent upon it. Non-material

labours, such as artistic labour, existing in the realm of circulationm may no in

themselves be ‘productive’ but are however crucial for the realisation of capital.

Marx did not ontologically distinguish between productive labour and non-material

labour, including artistic labour. Does this mean that Marx did not believe in the

critical and transformative power of art or artistic labour? We can only conclude that

he did not as long as artistic labour contained the same social relation as that of

productive labour. Artistic labour, does in Marx, therefore not simply dissolve into

productive labour. It only does so if its relations of production are the same as in the

latter’s.

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2.1. ANOTHER ONTOLOGY OF PRODUCTIVITY

In his article “Metamorphoses” Negri makes the claim that artistic labour today not

distinguishes itself ontologically from any other form of labour. This has, however

not always been the case, he writes, but is specific to the post-Fordist labour-process

which emerged in the late 1960’s and which is still the ruling mode of production.

The reason why artistic labour today not differentiates itself as such from productive

labour is because the contemporary post-capitalist economy has introduced new

forms of labour that have fundamentally changed the very concept of productivity

and productive labour.

According to Negri, has artistic labour always been running parallel with the

general modes of production in society, making it possible to outline a

“correspondance between the different epochs of artistic activity […] on the one

hand, and the forms of capitalist production and organization of labour, on the

other.”33 The years between 1848 and 1914, described by Negri as “the first great

episodes of industrial and metropolitan centralization in the exploitation of labour-

power,”34 brought an increased sense of the materiality of the working-class as well

as the self-management of workers as a response to the deepening technical division

of labour. These fundamental changes in the mode of production expressed

themselves, Negri claims, on the one hand, in realistic painting, and, on the other

hand, in the dissolution and possible reconstruction from “within the ‘mode of

production’”35 in Impressionism. The period between 1917 and 1968 is the

revolutionary phase of artistic and productive labour, according to Negri. The

alienation of labour increases in this period, however resulting in a stronger working-

class subject. (I will return to Negri’s account of the working-class subject.) “This is

the period in which abstraction and production are intertwined.”36 This

transformation of the labour process can be seen in the work of artists such as

Picasso, Duchamp, and Raushenberg, who all share an experience of “a subject

capable of demystifying the fetishised destiny imposed by capital.”37

33 MM, 21.

34 MM, 21.

35 MM, 21.

36 MM, 21.

37 MM, 22.

17

The current periodisation started in 1968 and is, claims Negri, characterised

by biopolitical and cognitive labour-processes, that is, labours in which the

production of commodities and the production of life have merged together. Labour

therefore, Negri claims, have undergone a metamorphosis and is now any longer

abstracted but instead a “vital excess beyond measure”38 which “transcends […] the

independence and autonomy of its own production.”39 Creativity is no more, claims

Negri, connected to ‘creation’ or ‘sublimation’ but to the biopolitical labour of life.

Negri argues that artistic labour today is – as each activity in capitalism –a

commodity and an activity. Uninterested in the aspect of artistic activity that

produces commodities, Negri emphasises instead “that mode of producing art which

is nothing other than the figure, the power of being creative in the world.”40 This is

why artistic labour, in the current mode of production achieves the “ontological

relevance possessed by all forms of labour in their creative facet.”41 This

convergence of artistic labour and cognitive productive labour further means that “the

desire for artistic expression is to be found everywhere.”42

If the concept of artistic labour is fairly absent in Marx, it is even more so in

the writings of Negri and other post-autonomists. Negri’s article “Metamorphoses” is

a rare example of a direct reference to artistic labour but does however express what

is present, but not explicit, in his other writings. By that I mean that, despite his lack

of discussion of artistic labour, his definition of productive labour automatically

subsumes all other forms of labour into its definition, artistic labour included.

Negri’s inclusion of artistic labour within the category of productive labour in

“Metamorphoses” does not however, imply the same thing as when Marx not

distinguishes artistic labour ontologically from productive labour. For Marx does

artistic labour not differentiate itself as such from productive labour and this is

because of the law of value’s indifference to the content of the labour process. The

consequence of this is that artistic labour always run the risk of being as alienated as

productive labour. Negri, on the other hand, includes artistic labour into the category

of productive labour to point at the creative form it has now taken.

38 MM, 24.

39 MM, 24.

40 MM, 22.

41 MM, 22.

42 MM, 23.

18

Negri’s concept of productive labour as a “creative excess”43 and that

“discovers forms for a surplus of productivity”44 is a central aspect of the entire post-

autonomist movement of which he is a part. For example, Lazzarato writes that

immaterial labour is:

“tightly linked to the values that only the forms of life produce. Creativity and

productivity in postindustrial societies reside, on the one hand, in the dialectic

between the forms of life and values they produce and, on the other, in the

activities of subjects that constitute them.”45

In a similar manner, Negri and Hardt claim in Empire that the production of life and

the production of capital are now indivisible. The contemporary global economy,

they claim, has brought with it labours in which “knowledge, information, affect, and

communication”46 are immanent to the production process. Labour has, as a

consequence, become a fundamentally creative process and appears “as the power to

act”47 and as a collective body. “Today labour is immediately a social force animated

by the powers of knowledge”48 and must therefore be conceived as “the productive

activity of a general intellect.”49

One of the first, and undoubtedly the most developed, analyses of this concept

of productive labour was carried out by Negri himself in Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons

on the Grundrisse. In this chapter I will look, therefore, at Negri’s analysis of Marx’s

concept of productive labour and the ‘general intellect.’ The overall questions I want

to ask are: how did Negri get to this concept of productive labour? By that I mean, on

what assumptions do Negri construct his concept of productive labour? And what

implications does Negri’s concept of productive labour have for the concept of

artistic labour?

Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse consists of a set of lectures on Marx’s

Grundrisse made by Negri in Paris in 1978 (although not published until 1991), on

43 MM, 24.

44 MM, 23.

45 Lazzarato. “Immaterial Labour,” 146.

46 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2000), 285.

47 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 358.



19

the invitation of Louis Althusser. The book is an analysis of the seven notebooks

constituting the Grundrisse, and, moreover, an attempt to go beyond an examination

of capitalism merely from the point of view of capital. Departing from Marx’s text

and then radicalising it, Negri proposes the possibility for the subversion of

capitalism followed by a collective and creative labour-process identified with

communism. This subversion of capitalism is dependent on Negri’s recuperation and

developed theory of the subjectivity of workers. Before I go into Negri’s analysis I

want to contextualise it with a brief exposition of Marx’s main claim in these pages.

The concept of the ‘general intellect’ appears in a section of the Grundrisse

which is about ten pages, (beginning by the end of Notebook Six, and continuing a

few pages into Notebook Seven) and is usually known as the “Fragment on

Machines”. Marx introduces the section by reminding us that the means of labour in

the processes of production have always been in continuous transformation. This

transformation is the outcome of capital’s tendency of appropriating the means of

labour needed for its production process. The means of labour have therefore

traditionally, Marx says, only undergone a “formal modification.”50 By that he refers

to the fact that the means of production have been included in the realisation process

of capital in such a way that they at one point of the production cycle have appeared

as the means of labour and at another point as a specific mode of capital “determined

by its total process – as fixed capital.”51 The main claim Marx makes in these pages is

that the final stage in the transformation of the means of labour into capital is “an

automatic system of machinery.”52 Once advanced machinery is introduced to the

process of production, the appropriation of living labour is no longer formal but real.

The real appropriation of living labour – expressed in advanced machinery –

appears, writes Marx, when all science and knowledge in society have been

subsumed and appropriated into the production process by capital. When capital in

this way adapts the general accumulation of knowledge to become the means of

labour, which it then turns into capital, “general social labour presents itself not in

labour but in capital.”53 This final stage of the adaptation of the means of labour by

capital is described by Marx as the transformation of a simple labour process into a

50 GR, 692.

51 GR, 692.

52 GR, 692.

53 GR, 694.

20

scientific one, and is governed by what Marx calls the ‘general intellect’.

“The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social

knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence,

the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of

the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To what degree

the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of

knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life

process.”54

NEGRI’S READING OF “FRAGMENT ON MACHINES” One of Negri’s main claims and points of departure in his lessons on the Grundrisse

is that capitalism is constructed in an antagonistic way, manifesting itself as a

separation between workers and capital. In its exploitative form, this antagonism is

the natural development of capitalism. The more capital exploit workers, the more the

antagonism deepens. The Grundrisse, Negri claims, is an exposition of the successive

stages of this antagonistic development of capitalism.

In Chapter Seven: “The Theory of the Wage and Its Developments”, Negri

proceeds by claiming that the antagonistic separation between capitalists and

workers, not only is the natural logic of capitalism’s development, but is also “the

key” to the workers’ emancipation from capital. This “key” reveals itself when the

antagonistic relation between workers and capital has reached its culmination point,

in which it implodes and inverts itself. More specifically does this culmination,

claims Negri, take place when the modes of production have been developed to the

stage Marx terms the “automatic system of machinery.”55

Negri's exposition of the “Fragment on Machines” can be divided, I would

suggest, into two moments. The first moment lies in an analysis and celebration of the

wage form with regards to its independent character within the capitalist production

process. The second moment is a close reading of the “Fragment on Machines,”

which reveals an understanding for how capitalism can be reversed. Lets start with

the first moment.

The wage-form, Negri claims, conceals the creative aspect of necessary

labour. It does so by only paying workers for their necessary labour while forcing 54 GR, 706.

55 GR, 692.

21

them to work longer than that, i.e. by exploiting them. If the wage-form hides the

creative aspect of labour, it also, claims Negri, hides the subjectivity of the working-

class. (Negri here draws from Marx’s historically independent definition of labour as

the creative process between men and nature in which the former uses all the powers

of their mind and body to make things that they need.) Therefore, the only way to

understand working-class subjectivity, according to Negri, is through an analysis of

the wage-form. So Negri’s goal is twofold: to reveal the creative labour inherent

within alienated labour, which cannot be done without his second aim, namely, the

constitution of a working-class subject.

The emphasis on workers’ subjectivity is vital to Negri’s exposition. By

emphasising that the working-class subject emerges from the constraints of the

capitalist mode of production, he articulates what is absent in Marx’s Capital, namely,

a theory of the subject within the labour process. Negri argues that it is insufficent to

analyse capital from an economic and objective perspective. Only through a reading

of capital from the perspective of the workers can a subversion and inversion of the

value-form take place. Marx introduced an economic and “objective” analysis of

capital with the theory of surplus value. Negri claims that in contrast to that, a

subjective, and therefore a political aspect, is brought in with the theory of the wage-

form.

“The wage, the quantity of necessary labour are not only the bias of capitalist

development, they also determine, in a general way, the fundamental laws. There

lies the creative function of necessary labour, its irresistible upward bias. From

being a condition, the theory of the wage becomes the rule of development. […]

The separation, from the workers’ point of view, is the consolidation of a

historically given reality; it is the productive power of the free subject which

dominates this terrain.”56

The importance of the theory of the wage-form further lies, Negri claims, in

the fact that the wage is independent from the capitalist law of value, thanks to it

taking place within the small-scale circulation of capital. Taking Marx’s distinction of

small- and large-scale circulation, the former one, Negri explains, is the place where

capital is paid out as wages and therefore where necessary labour is produced and

reproduced continuously. The wage-workers therefore reproduce themselves in the 56 MBM,133.

22

same moment as their labour-power is consumed by the capitalist. So the wage-form

is novel in being capable of taking part in large-scale-circulation simultaneously to

existing alongside and independently from it. “This means that the capitalist relation,

exchange and exploitation do not annul the independence of the proletarian

subject.”57 Negri therefore outlines a theory of the working-class subject’s agency

and resistance to capital as inherent within the very production and reproduction of

itself. “Only necessary labour has this capacity to oppose its own resistance to

capitalist valorization, a resistance that is its own conservation and reproduction.”58

The second moment in Negri’s exposition is a close reading of the “Fragment

on Machines,” which is perceived by Negri as the culmination of the antagonistic

relationship between capital and the working-class. The unfolding of the logic of

separation manifests itself, writes Negri, through a radical displacement of the law of

value. This displacement happens in two steps. First, capital’s capability of measuring

itself becomes inverted. Following Marx, Negri writes that a technologically

advanced mode of production, which is the result of the total subsumption of living

labour and therefore of all social forces in society, reduces the amount of necessary

labour-time to a minimum. Negri’s claim is that this reduction of necessary labour

and thus with it, necessary labour-time, makes it impossible for capital to measure its

own value, since there is no longer any measure to measure it with.

The second displacement of the capitalist form of value is the expansion of

productive capital into circulating capital, which is the result of the fact that the

entirety of society has been subsumed to capital. Circulating capital is, as already

mentioned, the place where the production and reproduction of necessary labour, and

thus the working-class subject, takes place. When the labour process has been

tranformed into a scientific knowledge process, the site of production moves out of

the traditional large-scale circulation and into small-scale circulation. So, in the new

mode of production, what before was circulating capital now appears as productive

capital. This implies, says Negri, that production and reproduction become

inseparable. It further suggests, he claims, that the violent logic of separation between

workers and capital has reached an irreversible culmination point in which the

workers can appropriate their own surplus-labour through a process of self-

valorisation. The workers are entirely subsumed to capital, but because of the 57 MBM, 134.

58 MBM, 135.

23

impossibility of measuring their labour – because there is "the evacuation of any

element of measure"59 – space for workers to appropriate their own surplus labour

emerges and “at this moment the impossibility of measuring exploitation modifies the

form of exploitation.”60 This means that the more that individual necessary labour is

reduced by capital, the more the workers can appropriate their own surplus-labour,

which therefore leads to an expansion of the collective necessary labour.

“Capital seeks a continual reduction in necessary labour in order to expand the

proportion of surplus value extorted, but the more it succeeds individually with

workers taken one by one, the more necessary labour benefits the collectivity and

is reappropriated by absorbing the great collective forces that capital would like

to determine purely for its own account. The compression of necessary individual

labour is the expansion of necessary collective labour and it constructs a ‘social

individual’, capable not only of producing but also of enjoying the wealth

produced.”61

When living labour has been turned into capital, the full displacement of the

law of value has taken place, Negri argues. At this point, the theory of value is not

any longer subordinated to the theory of surplus value. “We are here at the

culminating point of a process in which the power relations – rationally established –

regulated and included within the development of capital – are reversed.”62 Labour

turns into a collective process in which the needs of the collective individual

determine the production process. Productive labour and production continue as

within the capitalist process, but they are now determined by the needs of the social

individual which produces and reproduces its own conditions.

“Surplus labour had a uniform aspect in the capitalist project. The wage refigured

the shape of capital. When the wage as it developed became self-valorization and

reappropriation of surplus-labour, it was the end of all rules useful for

development. There is no more profit because labour productivity is no longer

translated into capital. […] Labour productivity is founded and spread socially. It

is both a magma which gathers and recomposes everything, and a network of

streams of enjoyment, of propositions and inventions which spread out across a

59 MBM, 147.

60 MBM, 147.

61 MBM, 145.

62 MBM, 148.

24

land made fertile by the magma.”63

Productive labour is for Negri an immanent activity arising from the

conditions of capital. When labour is measured with regards to the social individual,

no divisions can be made between productive and circulating capital , and so all

aspects of life must be counted as labour. Negri therefore criticises Marx’s definition

of productive labour, by expanding it beyond the latter’s vocabulary. Negri agrees

with Marx’s definition of productive labour as labour that produces surplus-value.

The problem arises, however, when trying to define where surplus value is created.

Negri claims that when the mode of production have become so advanced that the

entire human mind is subsumed, it will become impossible to distinguish

reproduction from production and therefore productive labour from unproductive

labour. The definition of productive labour must therefore be found in an expanded

concept which includes both reproduction and circulation. When productive labour is

defined in all its social materiality, it will also include the unemployed, the workers’

and the feminists’ movements. Even the “refusal of work”64 will be seen as having “a

productive essence.”65 As I have already pointed out, this means that the making of

art, i.e. artistic labour, is also included in the category of productive labour, with the

enormous creative potential ascribed to it by Negri.

63 MBM, 150.

64 MBM, 183.

65 MBM, 183.

25

2.2. THE LOGIC OF LIMITLESSNESS: CAPITAL’S CAPACITY FOR EXPANSION The main and overall problem with Negri’s reading of the “Fragments on Machines”

is the idea that capitalism will reach a culmination point or limit. My suggestion is

that Marx’s short investigation into developed machinery in the Grundrisse is the

exposition of precisely the opposite of that, namely capital’s capacity to continuously

expand itself. “Fragment on Machines” is therefore the manifestation of the real

subsumption of labour to capital.

The claim that capital will reach a culmination point when the mode of

production have subsumed the entirety of society is the result of two wrong

assumptions made by Negri. Before investigating those two aspects I would first like

to look at the similarities between the labour process within the real subsumption of

labour (discussed in my first chapter) and the labour process within “the automatic

system of machinery”66 as described by Marx in the “Fragment on Machines.”

Marx writes the following about the labour process within the real

subsumption of labour:

“The social productive forces of labour, or the productive forces of directly

social, socialized (i.e. collective) labour comes into being through co-operation,

division of labour within the workshop, the use of machinery, and in general the

transformation of production by the conscious use of the sciences of mechanics,

chemistry etc. […] This entire development of the productive forces of socialized

labour (in contrast to the more or less isolated labour of individuals), and together

with it the use of science (the general product of social development), in the

immediate process of production, takes the form of the productive power of

capital.”67

In this description of the labour process under the real subsumption of labour we find

all the main characteristics of the labour process as described by Marx in the

“Fragment on Machines”. Firstly, the idea that the labour process comes about

through a direct subsumption of living labour and therefore of all social forces in

society. And secondly, the idea that the labour process, taking place within the real 66 GR, 692.

67 CA, 1024.

26

subsumption of labour, as well as the labour process described in the “Fragment on

Machines,” makes labour appear as a collective process and not as the activity of an

individual worker. This, in both cases, further implies that the production process

comes to express the general development of science and technology in society.

Furthermore, and perhaps of more importance in relation to Negri’s exposition, Marx

says that, within the real subsumption of labour, the labour process reduces necessary

labour to a minimum, but only in order to produce a maximum number of cheaper

products. The result of this is, Marx writes, that the production process does not

become controlled by already existing needs. “[T]he quantity of products made is

determined by the constantly increasing scale of production dictated by the mode of

production itself.”68 What Negri saw as the novelty of necessary labour, i.e. its

capability of producing and reproducing itself within the capitalist mode of

production – and therefore the possibility of controlling it – is by Marx seen as

capital’s capacity of continuous expansion, absolutised under the real subsumption of

labour.

However, the fact that the labour process described by Marx in “The

Fragment on Machines” is identical to the labour process taking place within the real

subsumption of labour, such that his “Fragment on Machines” must be seen merely

as a development of his account of the real subsumption of labour, does not mean that

Negri’s theory falls flat. Negri’s theory of the reversal of capitalism is, as we know,

conditioned precisely on the real subsumption of living labour to capital. The main

problem is not, therefore, that Negri conditions the emancipation of the working-class

on the real subsumption of labour to capital, but that he interprets the latter as the

culmination point of and thus the end of capitalism. Negri’s theory is conditioned on

two wrongly made assumptions about the capitalist mode of production. Firstly, that

the technical division of labour does not devalue workers’ labour, and secondly, that

the technology used within the production process is neutral and independent from

the relations of production. Lets start with the question of the technical division of

labour.

The most important distinction between the labour processes under the formal

and real subsumption of labour is the technical division of labour forcefully

introduced with the latter. The technical division of labour, we understand from

68 CA, 1037-1038.

27

Marx’s writings – both from Capital and the Grundrisse – is the fundamental

devaluation of workers’ skills and knowledge. Marx writes that the difference in

skills and knowledge between workers and management was minimal under the

formal subsumption of labour. It is only with the real subsumption of labour that the

technical division and therefore the devaluation of workers’ skills and knowledge

becomes absolutised. This devaluation is expressed when Marx, in the “Fragment on

Machines,” describes how workers’ activity, within the new advanced mode of

production, is “reduced to a minimum”69 and therefore merely appears as the

system’s “conscious linkages.”70 All the scientific and technological development

objectified within the machinery therefore appears as an “alien power”71 to the

workers. This is to do with that the advanced machinery not functions as simple tools

did for workers in earlier labour-processes, i.e. as instruments to improve their

virtuosity and to make them more independent. On the contrary, the transformation of

the means of labour into the automatic system of machinery, controls and regulates

workers’ activities “from all sides”72 and therefore makes them more dependent than

they were before. The virtuosity that in the earlier mode of production belonged to

workers now appears to belong to the means of production.

So, what does the fact – that the real subsumption of labour, described by

Marx, essentially results in the devaluation of workers’ skills – mean in relation to

Negri’s claim that the workers’ creative labour process emerges immanently from the

real subsumption of labour? Lets first look again at Negri’s analyses of the “Fragment

on Machines”.

With the introduction of advanced machinery into the means of production,

necessary labour is reduced to a minimum. This, claims Negri, makes capital

incapable of measuring itself, which results in the law of value reaching a

culmination point where it reverses itself. The consequence of this is that the

production process continues as it did before, with the only difference being that the

workers rather than the capitalist reappropriate the surplus. Negri argues that at this

point labour loses its alienated character and instead turns into a creative process

guided by the needs of the social individual, which has now become a ‘general

69 GR, 701.

70 GR, 692.

71 GR, 693.

72 GR, 693.

28

intellect’.

By only emphasising the creative aspect of the labour process, while

simultaneously claiming that this creative labour process emerges immanently from

within the real subsumption of labour, Negri fundamentally rejects the devaluating

effect that the technical division of labour has on workers within the real subsumption

of labour. John Roberts criticises post-autonomist thinkers in general and Negri and

Hardt specifically for their emphasis on the creative aspect of the labour process.

“The emphasis on resistance internal to the labour process and the creativity of

labour allows the labour process to float free of capital. By insisting on worker

autonomy the existence and reproduction of labour within the capitalist enterprise

is weakened. Hence the very concept of a newly minted workers’ creativity

downgrades the structural and long-term realities of deskilling both external and

internal to immaterial labour.”73

Roberts criticises Empire for giving no account of how this “newly minted workers’

creativity”74 will arise within a labour-process in which workers’ creativity is

downgraded systematically. He argues that, contrary to promoting creativity and

autonomy, the labour process strangles both. He also points out that labour is so

firmly established within the capitalist labour process, that it cannot “float free of

capital.”75 The same critique, I would suggest, can be directed at Negri’s account of

workers’ creativity in his analysis of the “Fragment on Machines,” in which a

fundamental aspect of the labour-process under the capitalist mode of production –

namely, the technical division of labour – is completely ignored.

Roberts opposes claims that the technological and scientific advancements of

the capitalist mode of production increase workers’ creativity and knowledge, and

points out that management theory very often emphasise that contemporary forms of

labour enhance the creativity and knowledge of the workers. It is true, says Roberts,

that average skills increase with the development of technology and science in the

production process.

73 IoF, 212.

74 IoF, 212.

75 IoF, 212.

29

"Yet what is invariably omitted from this account is that the general increase in

skills are subject to an increasing polarization between workers and management.

Skills become accumulated and refined in various technical, supervisory and

administrative sectors; the mass of workers do not, however, benefit from these

changes. Indeed, they suffer from its consequences as their labour is consistently

stripped of its autonomy and sensuous form."76

This, writes Roberts, is the outcome of Marx’s account of the technical division of

labour, which “destroys and re-routinizes labour in order to create new subcategories

of labour."77 What Negri conceived as the condition for workers' self-valorisation, is,

for Roberts, the devaluation of workers' labour. That is why he claims that the real

subsumption of labour is essentially a process of deskilling of the worker, in which

his or her’s knowledge is appropriated into the technical process to leave him or her

“with an attenuated grasp of the technical processes that he or she simply now

adjusts.” The more advanced the technology introduced into the labour process, the

less skill workers need to operate it.

Roberts strengthens his argument by referring to Harry Braverman who

claims that the deskilling of workers is inherent to the secular development of

capitalism. Braverman claims that the increase in “intellectual”, non-manual labour,

expressed in for example the entertainment- and communication-industries, not has

increased the knowledge and skills of the workers, as the term “intellectual labour”

seems to imply, but on the opposoite, has only “created a huge pool of routinized and

unskilled clerical and service labour.”78 Braverman’s conclusion, writes Roberts, is

that the “occupational and craft heritage of the worker has been systematically

stripped and restripped under capitalism.”79

Roberts makes another important claim about the technical division of labour,

namely that it reveals the fact that “[t]echnology does not simply produce social

relations, [but] it is itself produced by the social relations of capital.” 80He thereby

points out that the technical division of labour comes about as a result of capital’s

subsumption and appropriation of technology. This contradicts Negri’s second

wrongly made assumption, namely, that technology is neutral and independent from 76 IoF, 82-83.

77 IoF, 83.

78 IoF, 84.

79 IoF, 84.

80 IoF, 86.

30

the capitalist logic.

In the “Fragment on Machines,” Marx writes that when necessary productive

labour stops, necessary labour-time stops being the measure of necessary labour and

so capital is therefore “the moving contradiction”81 in that its only measure is

necessary labour-time, and yet it reduces necessary labour-time, expanding surplus

labour-time. "Capital thus works towards its own dissolution as the form dominating

production."82 It would seem, then, that Marx was agreeing with Negri that the

automatic system of machinery would provide the condition for workers’

emancipation, if it weren’t for how Marx continues his exposition.

"Capital employs machinery, rather, only to the extent that it enables the worker

to work a larger part of his time for capital, to relate to a larger part of his time as

time which does not belong to him, to work longer for another.”83

Marx here points out that even though the amount of necessary labour is

reduced significantly within a scientific and technologically advanced labour-process,

the labourer works longer than before. The reason is, says Marx, that "the amount of

labour necessary for the production of a given object is indeed reduced to a

minimum, but only in order to realize a maximum of labour in the maximum number

of such objects."84 What Marx indicates here is that capital will always appropriate

the developments in society in favour of its own expansion – it has a capacity of

unceasingly subsuming new elements into the production process. Marx therefore

seems to imply that capital’s ability of unceasingly subsuming new elements into the

production process makes it difficult for workers to appropriate their own surplus-

production. "The most developed machinery thus forces the worker to work longer

than the savage does, or than he himself did with the simplest, crudest tools."85

Marx further reveals how the technical division of labour is dependent on, and

conditioned by capital’s subsumption of the entirety of society. This subsumption

could at first look positive. “Invention then becomes a business, and the application

of science to direct production itself becomes a prospect which determines and

81 GR, 706.

82 GR, 77.

83 GR, 701.

84 GR,701.

85 708-709.

31

solicits it.”86 Negri interprets this is Marx as if the workers now possess their own

means of production. But as Marx points out on several occasions – and this is

crucial:

"But this is not the road along which machinery, by and large, arose, and even

less the road on which it progresses in detail. This road is rather, dissection

[Analyse] through the division of labour, which gradually transforms the workers'

operations into more and more mechanical ones, so that at a certain point a

mechanism can step into their places."87

Marx shows us that the technical division of labour and the development of

technology and science go hand in hand. This is why Roberts claims that alienated

labour cannot merely be transformed by taking it over as Negri suggests, but must be

“transformed by non-heteronomous forms and practices.”88 I will explore Roberts’

account further in the next chapter.

MOBILISATION AND SUBJECTIVITY Despite the fact that Negri’s reading of “Fragment on Machines” lacks an

understanding of capital’s limitless expansion, specifically under the more advanced

mode of capitalist production, his writing does produce something which

distinguishes him from other post-Marxists such as John Roberts and which

contributes something fundamental to the idea of what artistic labour could be. This

‘something’ is his account of working-class subjectivity, and the capacity of

mobilisation and potential revolution that this evokes. This must be considered in

relation to the political climate Negri works within.

By emphasising the possibility of workers’ self-valorisation, Negri presents us

with a class subject which creates its own conditions. He thereby ascribes to workers

an agency that is completely missing in Marx’s Capital as well as in other post-

Marxists writings. Roberts affirms this when he writes:

“The repossession of subjectivity in labour is the key area which distinguishes

autonomist and post-autonomist writing from both the Frankfurt school and from

86 GR, 704.

87 GR, 704.

88 IoF, 86.

32

the Bakuninite-Gorz tradition. […] Waged and unwaged workers are not merely

passive victims of technological change, but active agents who are in a position to

contest the control of capital at the point of production.”89

The emphasis on workers’ potential to resist the capitalist production process

that Roberts describes, and which is maybe most developed in Mario Tronti’s

“Strategy of Refusal,”90 belongs to what Hardt distinguishes as the first phase of the

Italian radical autonomia. Significant for this stage, which began in the early 1960s

and ended in the early 1970s, were the factory workers who “constituted the epicentre

of the social movements.”91 The claim of workers’ autonomy from capital was also

vital, “that is, its power to generate and sustain social forms and structures of value

independent of capitalist relations of production, and similarly the potential autonomy

of social forces from the State.”92 These movements must therefore be seen as a

radicalised version of, and in opposition to, the Communist Party in Italy at the time.

The main slogan, Hardt writes, was “the refusal of work,”93 and simply meant refusal

to work within the capitalist mode of production. These cultural and political

experimentations, often expressed as activism, were at many times, Hardt claims,

more radical and longer lasting than, for example, the events in Paris and at Berkeley

College in the U.S. around 1968.

The second stage of the autonomia movement, Hardt writes, took place

between 1973 and 1979. With the post-capitalist economy and its new forms of

labour – largely based on communication and cultural commodities – the focus of

struggle shifted from the factory to the realm of life. “[T]he movements became a

form of life.”94 But it was also within this second phase that the Italian state

repressed “[t]housands of militants”95 who were arrested and tried, so that, by the

early 1980s “the political organization of the social movements was all but

destroyed.”96 Negri, who like many others within the movement was both a theorist

and activist, was imprisoned on political charges from 1979-1989. He was, as Sylvère 89 IoF, 210.

90 Mario Tronti, “The Strategy of Refusal,” in Autonomia: Post-Political Politics, ed. by Sylvère Lotringer and Christian

Marazzi (Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2007), 28-35.







33

Lotringer indicates, one of the main figures in the movement97 and, as a result, has

since lived in exile in Paris.

It is in this context that we have to read Negri’s lessons on the Grundrisse

made on invitation by Louis Althusser during his exile in Paris in 1978. With a

destroyed movement behind him, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse,

and especially the reading of the “Fragment on Machines,” is an attempt to remobilise

the forces and the hope of the workers’ revolution. We must therefore assume that

Negri’s aim was not to read Capital in the way most in keeping with Marx's original

intention, but in the way that produced the most possible potential for a

remobilisation of forces.

The emphasis on remobilisation rather than on the grief of what had been lost

further distinguishes Negri from several theorists writing on art and culture. Roberts

rightly points this out when he writes that thinking and writing about art since the

early twentieth century have been “grounded in the indivisibility of technical issues

and social questions.”98 Referring to the writings of theorists such as Benjamin

Buchloch, T.J. Clark, Thierry de Deauve and Hal Foster, he argues that this has

resulted in “an overwhelming attachment […] to loss of affect in front of the artwork

at the expense of any deeper understanding of the technical conditions of modern and

contemporary practice.”99 Hardt writes that the asceticism and denial that so many

leftist and cultural movements identify with a revolutionary life is substituted, in

Italian theorists’ writings, with “the collective pursuit of pleasures”100 There is no

ascetic denial within italian theorist writings, Hardt continues, “but rather the

adoption and appropriation of the pleasures of capitalist society as our own,

intensifying them as a shared collective wealth.”101 This is the reason, Hardt claims,

that post-autonomist writers so rarely, as we have seen in Negri too, develop a

critique of the commodity form. “These authors are continually proposing the

impossible as if it were the only reasonable option.”102

97 Sylvère Lotringer, introduction to Autonomia: Post-Political Politics, ed. by Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi (Los

Angeles: Semiotexte, 2007), v-vi.

98 IoF, 5.

99 IoF, 5.




34

We have seen how Negri’s conception of productive labour contains all forms

of labour and therefore includes artistic labour within it. If we adopted this definition

of productive labour with all its revolutionary potential, then this would have

fundamental implications for how we think of artistic labour. It too – like all other

forms of labour – will become the very centre of political action. For once artistic

labour is dissolved into the general labour process, it gains a political potential.

The mobilisation effect of Negri’s writing, does not, however, deal with the

fact that it does not offer a proposal on how the capitalist process of production

should be appropriated in such a way that it is transformed, rather than just taken

over.

35

3. ARTISTIC LABOUR’S CAPACITY OF TRANSFORMING ALIENATED LABOUR

John Roberts claims, in his already mentioned book The Intangibilities of Form: Skill

and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade, that the transformation of alienated to

non-alienated labour, must take place within the labour process itself. He further

proposes that artistic labour “is able to contribute decisively to this process.”103 I

would suggest that there are two fundamentally connected and interdependent reasons

for this to be found in Roberts’ writing. Firstly, according to Roberts, commodities

that are made by artistic labour are not as fully subjected to the capitalist law of value

as other commodities. Secondly – and as a result of that – artistic labour is not

exposed to the technical division of labour in the same way as productive labour is.

Lets start with the question of the law of value.

The reason that artistic commodities not are as subsumed to the capitalist law

of value is because artistic labour has the capacity of controlling and transforming its

materials throughout the entire production process, according to Roberts. Roberts

here appropriates and extends Theodor W. Adorno’s account of the non-reproducible

artwork’s potential for a specific kind of autonomy. Adorno, writes Roberts, did not

condemn reproducibility, for, following Walter Benjamin, he thought that

reproducibility was “what brings modern artistic forms into being, such as the novel

and the cinema.”104 Adorno did however, Roberts points out, criticise reproducibility

and therefore treated “the labour immanent to the [non-reproducible] work of art as a

special case.”105 Adorno’s claim is that, because the non-reproducible artwork is not

as much subject to reproducible forms of production as other commodities are, it

escapes the law of value. As a result, “the labour in the artwork is able to define the

potential critical and liberatory content of art’s labour,”106 by which Adorno refers to

the non-reproducible artwork’s potential to control, and thus to transform, all levels

of the labour process. This, claims Roberts, leads Adorno to ascribe to the non-

reproducible artwork, a specific sensuous autonomy.

103 IoF, 86-87.

104 IoF, 29.

105 IoF, 29.

106 IoF, 29.

36

“[I]n contrast to the reproducible artwork – the artwork that is potentially exposed

to the law of value – the unreproducible artwork allows all moments of its

production to be determined by the artist’s subjectivity. At no point in the work’s

production is the rationalization of labour determinate of the work’s outcome. For

Adorno, then, the unreproducible work of art encapsulates or concretizes a

particular kind of artistic autonomy, freely sensuous artistic subjectivity. Freely

sensuous labour may appropriate the materials and techniques of determinate,

heteronomous labour, but the making of the work is secured solely through the

autonomous actions of the producer.”107

Roberts’ critique of Adorno lies in the latter’s conception that it is solely the

non-reproducible artwork that can contest the value-form and therefore productive

labour. This, claims Roberts, “leads to a confinement of art’s use-values to

unreproducibility, severely narrowing what the artefactuality of the work of art might

be.”108 One cannot restrict the materials of artistic practices to non-reproducible

mediums. This is because, Roberts argues, that artists always have appropriated

materials from new realms of productive labour, in which new forms of reproducible,

as well as non-reproducible elements, are to be found. More importantly does Roberts

also claim that artists, in order to criticise the value-form and productive labour, in

fact must enter new areas of productive labour and engage with the forms and

elements developed there. This is to do with Roberts conception of that the mode of

reproducibility and the mode of commodity production, under capitalism, are deeply

intertwined.

Under the capitalist value-form, writes Roberts, “social reproduction – the

unceasing production and reproduction of the commodity – and technical

reproducibility (general social technique) are conjoined, one driving the other.”109

This is why Roberts claims that the critique and transformation of productive labour

must include forms of reproducibility. Roberts appropriation of Benjamin – who was

the first to theorise about art in relation to new forms of reproducible technology –

becomes evident when he writes that the most important historical truth that

Benjamin taught us is that “art and general social technique does not stand still.”110

Roberts finds in Benjamin what he thinks Adorno lacked, namely “an understanding 107 IoF, 30.

108 IoF, 31.

109 IoF, 15.

110 IoF, 17.

37

of the interrelations between technology, technicality and artefactuality as a cultural

form.”111 Such that, when art engages with new modes of technology and thus new

forms of productive labour, it must not be seen as the end of art’s sensuous

autonomy, but, on the contrary, as providing the possibility for art to enter “new use-

values and new modes of expression.”112 This is why, as we will see further on,

Roberts celebrates Marcel Duchamp’s found objects, which unashamedly are

products of productive labour. “Defending art, therefore, as a site of struggle against

the value-form cannot be based solely on the artefactual integrity of the

unreproducible artwork.”113

However, Roberts argues that the “freely sensuous”114 artistic autonomy

ascribed by Adorno to the unreproducible artwork, and capable of contesting the

value-form all the way down, must not be abandoned. Therefore, Roberts believes

that the difficult but crucial task for artists today is to restore the autonomy of the

artwork while simultaneously opening it up to new reproducible forms and thus new

forms of productive labour.

“Reproducible forms must embody, or at least recognize the transformative

subjectivity of the artist all the way down, for otherwise such artefacts become

congealed with the heteronomous effects of productive labour. What needs to be

explored, therefore, is how unreproducibility and reproducibility intersect with

each other, transforming the conditions of autonomy in art as a consequence. For

if autonomy cannot be secured solely through unreproducible forms of

artefactuality the struggle for autonomy is not excludable from reproducible

forms.”115

The second reason to Roberts’ assertion that artistic labour has a vital role to

play in the transformation of abstract labour, is that artistic labour, according to

Roberts, not is as subjected to the technical division of labour as productive labour is.

He acknowledges that artistic labour historically has been exposed to the technical

division of labour, and thus, as I have shown in chapter two, therefore also to the

deskilling of labour. “Art follows the historical tendency in production towards the

111 IoF, 31.

112 IoF, 32.

113 IoF, 32,

114 IoF, 30.

115 IoF, 32.

38

general lowering of all round craft skills.”116 However, writes Roberts, artistic labour

is not exposed to the technical division of labour in the same way as productive

labour is, and therefore, does the deskilling of artistic labour, he claims, not imply the

same thing as the deskilling of productive labour. This assertion, made by Roberts is

connected to Adorno’s claim that artistic labour contained in the non-reproducible –

by Roberts expanded to the reproducible – artwork’s capacity to transform its

materials throughout all levels of the production. The fact that Roberts includes

reproducible forms to the autnomous artwork’s transformative potential, is crucial for

his claim that artistic labour not is affected by the technical division of labour in the

same way as productive labour, and is moreover also his real contribution to the

discussion. Because artistic labour opens itself up “to autonomous forms of

transformation […] these forms of transformation will of necessity find their

expression in other skills than craft-based skills: namely, immaterial skills.”117 The

deskilling of artistic labour, such as in the withdrawal of traditional craft-based skills,

makes artistic skills to engage with new skills. By this Roberts means that within

artistic labour does reskilling emerge from deskilling, that is to say, although the

deskilling in artistic labour means that traditional handicraft is gone, the “immaterial

production of contemporary art allows for other, non handcraft, hand-to-eye skills;

the totipotentiality of the hand therefore finds other ways of being skilful.”118 This

stands in sheer contrast to productive labour, in which there is no dialectic movement

between deskilling and reskilling. When productive labour is exposed to deskilling, it

loses its sense of labour as a “sensuous, totalizing practice,”119 while the same

deskilling process of artistic labour leads to new immaterial skills and therefore does

not suffer from a loss of sensuousness.

The fundamental break with certain handicraft skills such as painting and

sculpture within artistic labour is most significantly expressed, Roberts claims, in

Duchamp’s unassisted readymades. The readymade, writes Roberts, began an epochal

shift in artistic labour, because with it, art started to enagage with “the technological

and technical transformations of the first decades of the twentieth century.”120 And

even though Pablo Picasso’s collages and Georges Braque’s papiers collés preceded 116 IoF, 87.

117 IoF, 87-88.

118 IoF, 95.

119 IoF, 89.

120 IoF, 24.

39

Duchamp’s readymades, Roberts claims that the latter are more important, as they left

the sphere of painting completely.

Duchamp’s readymades abandoned the artisanal content of painting and

sculpting. This departure from manual labour, did not however, argues Roberts, end

up with deskilled labour, but on the contrary, made the “artist’s hand able to act on

intellectual decisions in a qualitatively different kind of way.”121 The removal from

painterly and other traditional artistic skills were replaced by Duchamp with a

“productive process in which the nomination and transformation of found objects and

prefabricated materials represents a technical and cognitive readjustment on the part

of the artist to the increasing socialization of labour.”122 In other words, Roberts

claims that Duchamp’s readymades entered new forms of productive labour, which

resulted in the departure from manual artisanal skills, but, more importantly, also in

the employment of immaterial and intellectual skills. It is therefore wrong, Roberts

argues, to say that the readymade completely stripped skills from artistic labour.

“Traditional artistic skills are certainly challenged by the process of deskilling of the

readymade – violently so – but this deskilling is also the point where the artwork is

opened up to other skills and therefore to other use-values.”123

The immateriality of Duchamp’s artistic gesture, Robert explains, operates in

three directions simultaneously. Firstly, it moves artisanal content from its privileged

place within artistic labour. Secondly, it reveals the productive labour inherent in all

forms of artistic labour. And lastly, “it discloses the capacity of commodities to

change their identity through the process of exchange.”124 This is why Duchamp’s

readymades, for Roberts become, the most important examples of the reproducible

artwork’s ability to transform abstracted labour into non-abstracted labour. “For the

readymade not only questions what constitutes the labour of the artist, but brings the

labour of others – ideally at last – into view. Or, to be more precise, non-alienated

and alienated labour are brought into view simultaneously.”125

The fact that Roberts conceives artistic labour as the potential site for the

transformation of alienated labour into non-alienated labour, as expressed in 121 IoF, 24.

122 IoF, 23.

123 IoF, 24.

124 IoF, 34.

125 IoF, 24-25.

40

Duchamp’s readymades, reveals that artistic labour for Roberts is, and always must

be, fundamentally and ontologically different from productive labour. This difference

stems from, not its content, but its capacity of transforming its materials.

“What is purposeful about the labour of art is that it is transformative of its

materials in ways that are non-subsumptive and non-heteronomous, thereby

allowing the subjectivity of the artist to penetrate the materials of artistic labour

all the way down. Subject to the law of value productive labour is unable to

achieve this because the subjectivity of the producer is ‘blocked off’ from the

materials and machinery of production.”126

This distinguishes Roberts from Negri for whom “artistic labour gains the

ontological relevance possessed by all forms of labour”127 and which, in contrast to

Roberts, is connected to the content of specific forms of labour, namely intellectual

and immaterial labour. Although both Negri and Roberts assert that the critique of

productive labour must take place within the labour process itself do they have very

different accounts of how this should happen. The problem with Negri, as I tried to

show in the second chapter, is that he ignores the fact that general social technique is

conjoined with capitalist production, and so fails to offer an account of how general

social technique could be critically appropriated. As a result, alienated labour in

Negri’s theory is in fact never transformed, but only commanded. This is clear in his

analysis of the “Fragment on Machines” where the workers’ self-valorisation is based

simply on taking over the processes of production, rather than transforming them.

When the law of value has been reversed, writes Negri, “[t]he law of surplus value

continues to rule, but in reversed terms”128 by which he refers to that the production

continues as it did during capitalism, with the only difference that surplus-labour now

is reappropriated by the workers. The fact that Negri suggests that the emancipation

from alienated labour can take place by merely getting hold of the means of

production, rather than transforming them, reveals a much more fundamental

difference between Roberts and Negri. Negri bases his theory of workers’ self-

valorisation on the assumption that general social technique is neutral. Roberts on the

other hand, claims that the very reason for artistic labour to transform alienated

126 IoF, 87.

127 MM, 22.

128 MBM, 148.

41

labour, lies in artistic labour’s ability to transform – not merely take over – general

social technique. It is therefore the different views on what role general social

technique should play in the emancipation from alienated labour that fundamentally

distinguishes Negri and Roberts. This does however also leads to an interesting

convergence between what I will call, the “creative worker” and the “depoliticised

artist.”

Duchamp’s readymades are crucial for Roberts’ exposition as they manifest the

transformation of abstract labour into non-abstract labour. They are also important,

writes Roberts, because they “are able to concretize the real crisis of artistic skill and

puncture the retarded technical base of art in this period, and, in doing so, offer a

view of artists as thinkers and constructers.”129 Roberts here refers to his assertion

that Duchamp, along with early avant-gardists in Russia, through their artistic

practices, created a role of the artist identified more with that of an engineer and

fabricator than someone expressing an authentic inner self. As “thinkers and

constructers”130 artists such as Duchamp, Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov and

Alexander Rodchenko did not only bring general social technique into their practice,

but critically appropriated and transformed it. The problem, according to Roberts, is

that this artistic identity has since the 1960’s dissolved into that of a depoliticised

artist and creative entrepreneur.

Artistic labour has since the late 1960’s, writes Roberts, expanded into a wide

range of digital and non-digital medias. The trouble with many artistic practices since

then, he claims, is that these new forms of media are taken merely as “styles” and are

therefore not consciously integrated into the labouring-process. Artists use all sorts of

technologies and devices without critically transforming them all the way down, in

the way Duchamp did in his readymades. (It is important to note here that Roberts

does not condemn the fact that contemporary artists move between very different

forms of labour and technologies, on the contrary, this is what he celebrates in

Duchamp. His critique of contemporary artists is instead of the way in which they use

these new technologies and medias.) Roberts, therefore, directs a harsh critique

towards the contemporary artist role precisely for its uncritical use of different forms

of labour and technologies. This critique – of the artist role that emerged in the late 129 IoF, 26.

130 IoF, 26.

42

1960’s according to Roberts – becomes even more severe when he considers it in

relation to today’s advanced capitalism. The contemporary form of economy seems in

fact to encourage the artist role so despised by Roberts.

“Many younger artists see their identity as linked to the execution of tasks across

formal, cultural and spatial boundaries. Commitment to one method of production

or form of distribution, one set of cognitive materials, one outlook, is decried.

One of the consequences of this is the emergence of a historically novel tension

between a received (and depoliticized) older notion of the avant-garde critique of

authorship, and the reinvention of the artist as creative entrepreneur (under the

increased glare of celebrity culture.) […] The idea of the artist as an ensemble of

functions, becomes a set of multitasking career opportunities.”131

Lets now go to Negri’s account of the creative worker. The creativity

ascribed to the worker in Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, who

emerges in the advanced capitalist mode of production, and who in Negri’s later

writings is connected to labour-forms specifically performed in the creative and

communicative industries, seems similar, in its characteristics, to the role of the artist

that Roberts criticises so much. Negri and Hardt ascribe an enormous potential to

labour forms in which communication and virtual tasks dominate, precisely because

they encourage the worker to be creative, to cooperate and to multitask. The

contemporary artist’s identity that Roberts criticises, seems, therefore, to have

converged with the identity of the “creative worker” so celebrated by Negri and other

post-autonomists. This convergence shows that the idea that the advanced capitalist

mode of production should have created a collective or general intellect is highly

questionable. If the creative worker shares the same characteristics as the de-

politicised artist and the de-politicised artist is deskilled and alienated, then the

collective intellect consists of deskilled alienated workers.

Roberts’ claim that artistic labour has the potential to transform its materials

and therefore is vital to the transformation of alienated labour into non-alienated

labour, points at what Negri’s account of the emancipation from alienated labour

lacks, namely a critical approach towards general social technique. Roberts’ theory

of deskilling and reskilling also reveals something more fundamental about artistic

labour, which is that in order for artistic labour to criticise and transform alienated 131 IoF, 11.

43

labour, it must be visible as artistic labour, i.e. as art. Roberts’ claim that artistic

labour – in order to be able to criticise productive labour – must be visible as artistic

labour, is connected to his conception of artistic labour as transformative of its

materials. This is because, if artistic labour is transformative of its materials and in

that way transforms alienated labour into non alienated labour, in order to show this

transformation and thus in order to direct a critique of productive alienated labour in

general, this artistic labour must distinguish itself from productive labour. The only

way for artistic labour to do this, i.e. to distinguish itself from productive labour, is

by making itself visible as artistic labour, i.e. as art. As soon as artistic labour not

makes itself visible art art, it falls victim to the technical division of labour. This is

why Roberts criticises contemporary artist practices which have, what he calls, “low

artistic visibility.”132 He mentions for example the Danish artist group Superflex

whose artistic practice “favours working on projects that are directly and practically

beneficial to a group, community or client.”133 Roberts also refers to British artist

Gavin Wade, whose artistic practice is similar to that of Superflex’s in that it links art

“to the location and solution of specific material and social problems.”134 The

difficulty with these practices, claims Roberts, is that they dissolve artistic labour

into non-artistic labour. “Art is diffused into an ensemble of non-artistic intellectual

skills and competences.”135 There is therefore, in these practices, no dialectic

between deskilling and reskilling. Instead do they show what happens when artistic

labour dissolves into general social technique. The fact that artistic labour – in order

to criticise productive labour – must be visible as artistic labour, is also the reason to

why Roberts emphasises the importance the hand had in the artistic practices of

artists such as Duchamp as well as other early-avant garde artists. They engaged, he

writes, with general social technique, but because they never let go of the hand’s

subjective control, their practices never completely disintegrated with the techniques

they used.

“The transference of art into general social technique and, thereby, into scientific,

technological or political practice, merely submitted art to the heteronomous

forces it appropriated. This is why the ‘hand’ became a pressing issue for avant-

132 IoF, 216.

133 IoF, 215.

134 IoF, 216.

135 IoF, 217.

44

garde art in the mid-1920s as the new mass reproductive technologies were

subject to extensive capitalist development. Submitting wholeheartedly to general

social technique meant eventually submitting art to the technical division of

labour.”136

So, what Roberts shows is that artistic labour is vital for the

emancipation from productive alienated labour. And that in order for artistic

labour to perform this emancipation, it must differentiate itself from

productive labour. If artistic labour differentiates itself from productive

labour, then it also, writes Roberts, creates a spectator able to distinguish

between autonomous non-alienated labour and productive alienated labour.

And it is only “on the basis of recognizing this difference that the negation of

labour by those who labour might proceed.”137

136 IoF, 218. 137 IoF, 218.

45

BIBLIOGRAPHY NB. Abbreviations for footnotes are in bold type PRIMARY TEXTS Hardt, Michael., and Antonio Negri. Empire, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000. Hardt, Michael., and Paulo Virno, ed. Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Marx, Karl. Capital. Vol I. London: Penguin, 1976. (C) Marx, Karl. Grundrisse. London: Penguin, 1973. (GR) Appendix to Capital, Vol I., by Karl Marx, 943-1084. London: Penguin, 1976. (CA) Negri, Antonio. Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse. London: Pluto Press, 1991. (MBM) Negri, Antonio. “Metamorphoses.” Radical Philosophy 149 (2008):21-25. (MM) Roberts, John. The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade. London:Verso, 2007. (IoF) SECONDARY TEXTS Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Translated by J.A. Underwood. London: Penguin, 2008. Bottomore, Tom, Ed. A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991. Lotringer, Sylvère. and Christian Marazzi, ed. Autonomia: Post-Political Politics. Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2007. Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol. 2, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1969. Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol. 4, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1969. Osborne, Peter. How To Read Marx. London: Granta Books, 2005. Virno, Paulo. A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary forms of Life. Translated by Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito and Andrea Casson. Los Angeles: Semiotext:, 2004.

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ARTICLES Lazzarato, Maurizio. “Art, work and politics in disciplinary societies and societes of security.” Radical Philosophy 149 (2008): 26-32. Lazzarato, Maurizio. “Immaterial Labour.” In Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, edited by Paulo Virno and Michael Hardt, 132-147. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Osborne, Peter. “Whoever Speaks Of Culture Speaks of Administration As Well: Disputing Pragmatism in Cultural Studies.” Cultural Studies Vol. 20, No 1 (2006): 33-47. Osborne, Peter. “Marx and The Philosophy of Time.” Radical Philosophy 147 (2008):15-22. Toscano, Alberto. “The Sensuous Religion of the Multitude: Art and Abstraction in Negri.”, Third Text Vol. 23, Issue 4, (2009): 369–382. Tronti, Mario. “The Strategy of Refusal.” In Autonomia: Post-Political Politics, edited by Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi, 28-35. Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2007.

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