Journal of Communication Inquiry

This essay introduces the reader to the special issue commemorating Michael Hardt and Toni Negri’s trilogy (Empire, Multitude, Commonwealth).

This paper explores the contributions of autonomist Marxist theory to my understanding of reality television, self-branding and social media. Autonomist Marxist ideas help to bridge the classic media studies divide between critical political economy and cultural studies, illuminating the very material connections between television’s mode of production, its texts, and its broader cultural context and impact. Concepts such as the social factory, immaterial labour, the socialized worker, and virtuosity, contributed by thinkers such as Mauricio Lazzarato, Paolo Virno, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, have enabled me to argue that reality television is a privileged site of production in the post-Fordist era; it not only produces texts or ideologies about work and life, but also models the monetization of “being” and produces “branded selves”. While autonomist ideas are extremely useful, the field of thinking is complex and not without its internal debates. This paper also explores contributions by George Caffentzis, Massimo de Angelis and David Harvie, specifically the concept of the war over measure, arguing that this concept helps to frame some of the ways in which the public expression of opinion and feeling online and in social media are being captured, measured and put to work for capital.

At first glance, Hardt and Negri.FN”s brief excursion into the sociology of media in Empire is hardly earth shattering; in fact it is quite disappointing. In Empire the media occupies a fraught and complex space between the past (civil society) and the emergence of the neoliberal consensus in which capitalism is considered the only social and economic option. Popular instrument or lackey for corporate capital, this is the tension that marks institutional forms of media. But by looking more closely at Hardt and Negri’s diagram of Empire, we find that there is a second and more expansive sense of the operation of media. Media works as the glue that holds the heterogeneous components of Empire in place. This glue (media operation), however, serves a double function. On the one hand, it works as communication that connects and information is exchanged, but, on the other, it connects in such a way that it maintains heterogeneity and distance. The double function of media as communication, the article contends, should be understood in terms of the logic of connection without connectivity. This logic is central in mechanisms of control in the context of Empire, and, the article maintains, crucial for any analysis of contemporary media today.

This article explores the different models of political communication that inhere in Hardt and Negri’s Empire trilogy, models that are explicit and implicit, intended and accidental, dominant and latent. From their existence tangled up in Hardt and Negri’s work, I draw out for consideration the communicative models of the rhizome-book, manifesto, textbook, mass-market book, autonomous language, and political journal. My aim is less to evaluate the relative dominance of these models in the trilogy, than to take the opportunity this work offers for thinking political communication as specifically communist problematic, a somewhat neglected field of inquiry.

We seek to elaborate the concept of corruption as formulated by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. By providing a brief history of the concept, we show that it reveals how the compositional and autonomous politics of class struggle and becoming are threatened by decompositional techniques of capture and exploitation. In order to thicken the historical-material specificity of this distinction, we provide a research note about organized labor’s effort to communicate an alternative to Governor Walker’s union busting legislation in Wisconsin. We are particularly critical of the effort to re-direct the class struggle into an electoral campaign of recall and referendum.

This article considers autonomist practices of communication commoning amidst the neoliberal enclosures. I reflect on recent theoretical distinctions between the notion of the common and the commons and argue for an approach that brings them together both conceptually and in practice. One place where we find the common and the commons converge is in globalizing communication infrastructures. And it is through the infrastructure of global communication, I argue, that one of the principle political technologies of contemporary enclosure comes into sharpest focus: fear. If, as many observers contend, the political use of fear is instrumental to modern processes of enclosure, we can look to the urban communication infrastructure is a site of resistance to the double enclosure of the common and the commons because it is a site that encompasses both the means of mediation and the wealth of human sociality. To illustrate, I briefly discuss three examples in which the communication infrastructures are appropriated by social movements whose aim is to resist the politics of fear while they re-claim the communicational common/s.

Hardt and Negri’s description of Empire is in a large part based on Michel Foucault’s account of biopolitics. For Hardt and Negri, the biopolitical nature of Empire means that social forms and modes of subjectivity are considered as the result of communication processes, and that imperial domination is exercised through networks of communication. However, this reading of Foucault is problematic inasmuch as he never reduced communication or modes of subjectivity to a product of biopolitical society. As a consequence of this partial reading, Hardt and Negri fail to consider the specificities of biopolitical communication. Furthermore, by taking the Internet as the model for communication and social forms in Empire, Hardt and Negri seem to ignore the constitutive nature of communication and address the role communication could take in the liberation process of the multitude.

This article discusses the relation between the concepts of the Epicurean void and the aleatory encounter in Louis Althusser’s late philosophy and the concepts of kairòs and the common name (or common concept; nome comune) in Antonio Negri’s later work. It is important to consider the political efficacy of nome comune in the context of ontological commitments such as the Althusserian void and Negri’s “postmodern” landscape of “total subsumption,” among other reasons because common concepts play important social and political mediating roles in both modern broadcast media and in more recent ranked information retrieval, crowd-sourced information aggregation, and computer mediated communication.

In Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri analyze the major shifts in the inner workings of capitalism and class that have taken place across the last forty years. Building on these global transformations they offer a compelling vision for a new political project, which relies on the growing power of a new political subject, the multitude. They argue that this new political subject is irreducible to a singular identity or project, and therefore demands new horizontal networked, organizational forms, held together by communication technologies, in an effort to forge a radical democratic praxis. In this essay I argue that while their vision for a new logic of contemporary class-based social movements takes us in important new directions ultimately they are unable to deliver on the pledge of a meaningful political program because they rely to heavily on communications as a tool to bind the multitude.

This article is a dialogue with the Italian autonomist media theorist Franco Berardi, also known as Bifo. The discussion turns on how to conceptually frame Italian experiments in media activism—from the pirate broadcaster Radio Alice to the networked microemissions of Teletreet. Throughout, special emphasis is put on the importance of Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari to the creative wing of Italian autonomist thought which focused on media, communication, and culture. Thus “the Italian Foucault” is presented as an apposite conceptual persona. Finally, both the Foucault-inspired dispositif and the more autonomist composizione (elsewhere presented as either composition or recombination) are suggestions for better theorizing new networked organizational forms. Thus, media is presented as constitutive of the social body; that is, media is not understood as an additive with “effects” but as comprising and calibrating those constitutive elements, their affective, communicative, and signifying capacities.

Taking cue from the Marxian analysis of the relationship between cooperation and capitalist command in Capital and the Grundrisse, the article reviews how Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have addressed this matter. Drawing from the notorious fragment of the Grundrisse on the general intellect, Hardt and Negri argue that in post-industrial societies the production of value tends to coincide with the ensemble of social activities. Hardt and Negri maintain that since any social activity is potentially a value-generating practice, the capitalist organization of labor is increasingly parasitical and external to the social bios. From this flows that labor can no longer be measured in abstract units of time and the exploitation of living labor leaves way to the expropriation of the common. The second part of the article challenges Hardt and Negri’s idealized view of the common by arguing that in the society of control communication and cooperation are always affected and tinged by the media that enable them—the vast majority of which are owned by private corporations. Neither the general in Marx’s Capital who organizes the workers from above nor the watchman and regulator of the Grundrisse, the contemporary engineer of control deploys micro-mechanisms of control inside the digital networks that modulate social cooperation. Drawing from Andrejevic’s notion of the “digital enclosure” and Terranova’s analysis of subjectification in the societies of control, the article concludes with a reflection on post-consensual forms of cooperation that cannot be integrated without igniting a catastrophic transformation of the system.

Responding to a recent marketing campaign in Australia, this paper considers how the politics of love suggested in Hardt and Negri’s Commonwealth (2009) may have pragmatic application for media studies. The publicity strategies of a major bank in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis provide a rich illustration of the ways love’s genres and registers can be directly co-opted towards commercial interests - and the challenges this presents for critical thinking. Placing Hardt and Negri’s ‘turn to love’ in the context of ongoing debates in feminist and queer theory, the paper isolates both the possibilities and limitations of autonomist thinking. The authors’ distinct contribution is to note the inventiveness characteristic of both love and poverty, which in turn provides a model for the kind of ontological bearing necessary to trouble the ongoing pact between intimacy and property under capitalism.

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

This article considers the growing convergence between labor and communication in the digital economy. Taking the rapid growth of call center employment as its focus, the article argues that the approach taken by the political and theoretical tradition of post-operaismo, or autonomist Marxism, has produced promising encounters between labor activism and communication inquiry. Through its theory of cognitive capitalism and its focus on labor resistance, the article suggests, post-operaismo offers communication scholars a set of tools through which to move beyond the limits of both liberal-democratic theories of the knowledge worker and Marxist labor process theory.

Publication of Hardt and Negri’s trilogy coincides with the ascent of a dominant discourse on the so-called creative economy that presents media, communication, and cultural sectors as priority sites for market growth and job opportunity. Hardt and Negri’s work and the wider autonomist tradition supply elements for a counter-perspective on the vaunted creative economy. Of the vast lexicon associated with autonomist thought, two concepts—precarity and recomposition—are especially relevant to an oppositional response to the creative economy. The first part of the paper introduces a schema of precarious labour personas so to illuminate some of the multiple manifestations of labor precarity as an effect of post-Fordist exploitation. The concept of precarity is, however, more than a linguistic device highlighting labor conditions that are denied in dominant discourses on the creative economy. It also signals a promising laboratory of a recomposition of labor politics in which media and communication workers are participants. The second part of the paper therefore identifies collective responses to precarious employment, including emerging workers’ organizations and policy proposals emanating from within and beyond immaterial production milieus.

In this article, I discuss an issue which lies at the core of today’s “political economy” of the domestic sphere. The issue in question is that human beings are pushed to “outsource” their emotions, information, communication, education, organization, and entertainment, while they are left with scarce new technological support with which to cope with the fatigue, stress, boredom, and complexity of housework. My question is “Why has technology which is related to the material aspects of housework ceased to develop, whereas the technology connected to its immaterial aspects (information and communication technologies or ICTs) has grown at an increasing rate?” For answering this question, I analyze briefly how the machinization of the domestic sphere has developed the technologies connected to material labor such as means of transportation and domestic appliances and those connected to immaterial labor such as mass media, ICTs, and new media. A double strategy has always been pursued: a specific strategy is applied to immaterial labor, involving a great deal of technology, and an opposite strategy, involving much less technology, is applied to material labor. This bifurcation is necessary to maintain a high level of value production in everyday life. Nowadays immaterial labor not only creates value in the process of reproduction of the labor force but also generates capital directly. One only needs to think, for example, of Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, and so on. They are basically enterprises which extract value directly from sociability, friendship, and emotion for producing capital.

Within communication studies today, the term labor is being employed more often and with more variety than at any time in the discipline’s history. What role did the Empire phenomenon play in this recent promotion of labor into such a fungible and expansive category? Contemporary theories and analyses of communication are largely dispensing with traditional oppositions like production and consumption, labor and leisure, or everyday life and any of the above. The influence of Hardt and Negri has left us less inclined to describe new forms of leisure and consumption in contrast to labor and more likely to find in them new modalities of labor.

This article considers the political limitations of Hardt and Negri’s treatment of time in Empire and offers the concepts of “The Biopolitical Economy of Time” and “Recalibration” as a means to enliven the possibility to demand a social wage for all.